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The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks. From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Jody Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures. Berland's genealogy of the virtual menagerie begins in 1414 when a ruler in Bengal sent a Kenyan giraffe to join a Chinese emperor's menagerie. It maps the beaver's role in the colonial conquest of Canada and examines the appearances of animals in early moving pictures. The menagerie is reinvented for the digital age when image and sound designers use parts or images of animals to ensure the affective promise and commercial spread of an emergent digital infrastructure. These animal images are emissaries that enliven and domesticate the ever-expanding field of mediation. Virtual Menageries offers a unique account of animals and animal images as mediators that encourage complicated emotional, economic, and aesthetic investment in changing practices of connection.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction Mapping North of Empire -- One Writing on the Border -- Two Space at the Margins Colonial Spatiality and Critical Theory after Innis -- Three Spatial Narratives in the Canadian Imaginary -- Four Angels Dancing Cultural Technologies and the Production of Space -- Five The Musicking Machine -- Six Locating Listening -- Seven Weathering the North -- Eight Mapping Space Imaging Technologies and the Planetary Body -- Nine Cultural Technologies and the "Evolution" of Technological Cultures -- Postscript -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

This article summarizes research on the suppression of science research and the closure of libraries, laboratories, the census and other research resources under Canada's Conservative Government. ; This article summarizes research on the suppression of science research and the closure of libraries, laboratories, the census and other research resources under Canada's Conservative Government.

Discusses the nature & impact of the heavenly perspective offered by weather satellites. Whereas our ancestors looked up to the skies & stars to divine the weather & other knowledge, modern technology allows us to look down on the globe from an "objective" viewpoint. It is argued that the occasional failure of technology to accurately forecast the weather suggests a degree of subjectivity, & that the maps used to represent the globe evidence the influences of politics, economics, & mythology. It is suggested that the popularity of satellite weather forecasting has legitimated massive expenditures on space & computer technologies that are fundamentally military by design. Despite the practical benefits of such forecasts, it is concluded that the true appeal of satellite imagery rests in the symbolic representation of a partnership between science & art, & the ambiguity between the sublime beauty of the heavenly perspective & the underlying natural & sociopolitical powers. T. Sevier