In this incisive book, Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

While much has been written on the cultural and intellectual antecedents that gave rise to Carolus Linnaeus?s herbarium and his Systema Naturae, the tools that he used to transform his raw observations into nomenclatural terms and categories have been neglected. Focusing on the Philosophia Botanica, the popular classification handbook that he published in 1751, it can be shown that Linnaeus cleverly ordered and reordered the work by employing commonplacing techniques that had been part of print culture since the Renaissance. Indeed, (...) the functional adaptability of commonplace heads allowed him to split and combine the book?s chapters and tables and played a notable conceptual role in the way in which he spatialized words and, to a certain extent, specimens. (shrink)

Depictive expressions of thought predate written language by thousands of years. They have evolved in communities through a kind of informal user testing that has refined them. Analyzing common visual communications reveals consistencies that illuminate how people think as well as guide design; the process can be brought into the laboratory and accelerated. Like language, visual communications abstract and schematize; unlike language, they use properties of the page (e.g., proximity and place: center, horizontal/up–down, vertical/left–right) and the marks on it (e.g., (...) dots, lines, arrows, boxes, blobs, likenesses, symbols) to convey meanings. The visual expressions of these meanings (e.g., individual, category, order, relation, correspondence, continuum, hierarchy) have analogs in language, gesture, and especially in the patterns that are created when people design the world around them, arranging things into piles and rows and hierarchies and arrays, spatial-abstraction-action interconnections termed spractions. The designed world is a diagram. (shrink)