"I Saw You": searching for lost love via practices of reading, writing and responding

How do emotions move and how do emotions move us? How are feelings and recognitions distributed socio-materially? Based on a multi-site ethnographic study of a romantic correspondance system, this article explores the themes of love, privacy, identity and public displays. Informed by ethnomethodology and actor-network theory its investigations into these informal affairs are somewhat unusual in that much of the research carried out by those bodies of work concentrates on institutional settings such as laboratories, offices and courtrooms. In common with ethnomethodology it attempts to re-specify some topics of interest in the social sciences and humanities; in this case, documents and practices of writing and reading those documents. A key element of the approach taken is restoring to reading and writing their situated nature as observable, knowable, distributed community practices. Re-specifying topics for the social sciences involves the detailed description of several situated ways in which the romantic correspondence system is used. Detailing the translations, transformations and transportations of documents as 'quasi-objects' through several orderings, the article suggests that documents have no essential meaning and that making them meaningful is part of the work of those settings

An ethnography of a neighbourhood café: informality, table arrangements and background noise

Café society is something that many of us as customers and/or social theorists take for granted. Cafés are places where we are not simply served hot beverages but are also in some way partaking of a specific form of public life. It is this latter aspect that has attracted the attention of social theorists, especially Jürgen Habermas, and leads them to locate the café as a key place in the development of modernity. Our approach to cafés is to ‘turn the tables’ on theories of the public sphere and return to just what the life of a particular café consists of, and in so doing re-specify a selection of topics related to public spaces. The particular topics we deal with in a ‘worldly manner’ are the socio-material organisation of space, informality and rule following. In as much as we are able we have drawn on an ethnomethodological way of doing and analysing our ethnographic studies

Traditional Accounting with Decentralised Ledger Technology

Distributed ledger technology is by some believe to be the accounting system of the future, replacing the centuries-old double-entry accounting paradigm, as it has desirable characteristics such as tamper-resistance. However, it might suffer from technology lock-in as double-entry bookkeeping, due to its long-standing history, has offered the conceptual foundations for many laws, regulations and business practices. While some of these laws, regulations and practices might become obsolete as a result of distributed ledger technology, some might still prove to be valuable in a new technological context. While aiming at unlocking the potential of distributed ledger technology in an accounting context, we also want to preserve the wisdom of accounting craftsman. For this reason, it is the aim of this paper to offer a bi-directional mapping between traditional double-entry bookkeeping and innovative paradigms that have proven their value in decentralised systems, of which distributed ledger technology is an exponent. This paper offers such a mapping for the Resource-Event-Agent paradigm

Les états intentionnels des créatures solitaires

Je soutiens qu'il y a deux façons d'individuer les états intentionnels de créatures qui sont dépourvues de toute compétence linguistique, à savoir par leur rôle propositionnel ou par leurs conditions de vérité, mais que cette distinction ne vaut que pour les états intentionnels singuliers. L'examine ensuite différentes façons de spécifier, tout en restant dans le cadre d'une conception représentationnaliste de l'intentionnalité, les conditions de vérité des attributions d'états intentionnels privés (ou sublinguistiques) du langage ordinaire selon le mode d'individuation considéré. Il s'avère qu'une attribution d'état intentionnel singulier ne peut identifier simultanément le rôle propositionnel et les conditions de vérité des états intentionnels attribués, et que la nécessité d'invoquer des états intentionnels de se pour expliquer les comportements menace de remettre en question la thèse représentationnaliste.I claim that there are two ways of individuating the intentional states of creatures without any kind of linguistic competence, namely, either by their propositional role or by their truth-conditions, but that this distinction holds only for singular intentional states. I then consider several ways of specifying, within the limits of a representational theory of intentionality, the truth-conditions of statements attributing private (or sublinguistic) intentional states according to the mode of individuation chosen. It turns out that such statements cannot simultaneously identify both the propositional role and the truth-conditions of the intentional states attributed, and that the need to invoke de se intentional states in order to explain behavior seems to put the representational theory into difficulty

Le musée de l’Institut canadien de Montréal (1852-1882), un projet inachevé

Instauré en 1852, le projet de musée de l’institut canadien de Montréal bénéficie de présents (moulages de sculptures) faits par les musées impériaux de France et le prince Napoléon (estampes), ainsi que de spécimens de sciences naturelles venus du Canada et de pays étrangers. Ajoutons des pièces de numismatique et des souvenirs historiques et le profil hétéroclite de cette collection se dessine. Son objectif : servir « les idées de progrès et de liberté » qui étaient au cœur de la mission de l’institut canadien. L’histoire de ce musée (1852-1882) est relatée à travers les efforts et la pensée des figures de deux de ses défenseurs les plus énergiques : Joseph-Guillaume Barthe et Gonzalve Doutre. elle est présentée comme emblématique de la pratique de la muséologie au Québec au XIXe siècle.Established in 1852, the museum project of Montreal’s Institut canadien received presents from French imperial museums (mouldings and sculptures) and Prince Napoleon (prints) in addition to natural science specimens from Canada and some foreign countries. The ill-assorted profile of this collection becomes clear with the addition of numismatics and historical mementos. The museum’s objective was to serve “ideas of progress and liberty” at the very heart of the Institut canadien’s mission. The history of the museum (1852-1882) is told through the thought and efforts of two of its most energetic supporters: Joseph-Guillaume Barthe and Gonzalve Doutre. This episode in history may be seen as emblematic of museological practice in nineteenth-century Quebec