This chapter examines the origins of news as a commodity in the Atlantic world. In the wake of Columbus’ voyages, the Americas emerged as an important feature in Renaissance Europe’s increasingly global consciousness. Gradually, as novelty receded, news from across the ocean became a staple item in handwritten newspapers. The rhythm of transatlantic news, unlike ‘regular’ European news, was determined by the intricate pattern of winds and currents, and the threat of hurricanes in the Caribbean, which turned the ocean into a barrier. This chapter zooms in on the characteristics of transatlantic news by focusing on European-wide coverage of the fateful campaign of Sir Francis Drake to Puerto Rico and Panama in 1595-96. The famous Fuggerzeitungen, news reports collected from all across Europe by the Fugger merchant family in Augsburg, reveal that correspondents in Protestant towns wrote hopeful reports of Drake’s success in capturing Havana, while avvisi in Italy were literally months ahead in their coverage of the admiral’s failure and death.

In this chapter, we reflect on re-decentralisation in human–data interaction. This represents very personal views, particularly potentially revisionist history, and we encourage people who were around for any of this time to disagree. When we use the word centralisation, we are referring to ownership and management. Of course, there are other players in the supply chain, hardware vendors, government, civil society, but let us concentrate on this service aspect in this work. In the somewhat early days of the Internet (e.g., 1980), we saw it as a decentralised system that contrasted with the central telephone systems. The phone systems had until then largely been national monopolies. Whilst some of them were distributed in terms of technical management and operations, they were centralised in terms of ownership and administration. The Internet was decentralised at the network layer and later in terms of assigned numbers and traffic. Twenty years later, post world-wide-web and cloud and since the start of the smart phone revolution, from 2000 onwards, we see a massive swing towards centralisation of the Internet in almost all of its layers (e.g., Baig Viñas, 2019). This has consequences, some, but not all, of which are bad. It is time to think about re-decentralisation and how we might address some of the unfortunate consequences. We look at this through the lens of Human–Data Interaction.

This chapter presents a structured account of the Framework and Topology of Methods in Behavioural Data Science, expanding upon a four-stage methodological process – data collection, data processing, feature engineering and model development – and introducing four foundational conceptual pillars: Hypothesis Testing at Scale, Data Science Modelling for Behavioural Problems, Gap Detection and Hybrid Modelling. These pillars not only represent distinct methodological orientations but also correspond to divergent epistemological and ontological commitments within the field. The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of methods and tools used at each stage of the Behavioural Data Science workflow, illustrates how emerging technologies such as large language models (LLMs) reshape methodological choices and concludes with ethical considerations and future directions. In so doing, it advances a unified topology of Behavioural Data Science methods capable of accommodating both theory-driven and data-driven approaches, while responding to gaps in traditional behavioural science paradigms.

We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in South Africa, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, we reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

We offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.

What is literary about fashion and what are the ways in which fashion is literary? How and why does this matter for Black designers who reference Black history and culture in their work to intervene in dominant narratives about Black identity and the ways in which fashion broadcasts and/or delimits Black cultural expression? This chapter discusses the work of two Black fashion designers, Patrick Kelly and Kerby Jean-Raymond, both of whose careers can be described as “literary,” albeit in different ways. It argues that, despite the very different grammar of Kelly and Jean-Raymond’s work, as well as the decades that separate them, Jean-Raymond finds himself (at times) inside of Kelly’s story, mounting a similar critique of the fashion industry and its “single story” of Black designers and Black culture as available for exploitation and appropriation. This chapter proposes that Kerby’s literariness, his insistence that he tell his story with a capital “I” – intimately involving and representing his loved ones and a diasporic Black family in his clothes and in their performance at his shows – might create a new, liberatory language for and with fashion and race.

This chapter explores how statistical mechanics and cyber-physical systems (CPS) can be applied to understand, model and predict behavioural phenomena. While traditionally rooted in physics and engineering, these paradigms offer novel approaches to behavioural data science, especially when dealing with collective dynamics, stochasticity and feedback within complex human and socio-technical systems. We explore the conceptual translation of entropy, phase transitions and emergent behaviour from physics to behavioural modelling, alongside the increasing convergence of CPS and behavioural sensing platforms. Through worked examples, such as crowd evacuation, financial panic and human–machine coordination in urban environments, this chapter demonstrates how statistical mechanics and CPS not only extend behavioural theory but also provide practical frameworks for real-time behavioural prediction and intervention. The ethical implications of using such models – especially those with predictive or persuasive power – are also discussed, ensuring the conversation remains grounded in responsible innovation. Building upon these considerations, this chapter also examines the integration of system identification, feedback control and stability analysis into behavioural cyber-physical systems. System identification enables CPS to infer latent behavioural dynamics from observational data, supporting adaptive modelling under uncertainty and partial observability. Dynamic closed-loop architectures use these models to enable real-time adaptation to evolving behaviours with Lyapunov stability theory providing a principled framework for certifying safe and predictable responses. Applications in smart agriculture and defence robotics show how distributed autonomous systems achieve robust coordination, adaptive authority delegation and stable operation under mission-critical conditions. These advances highlight the critical role of integrating control-theoretic principles into behavioural models to ensure the reliability and predictability of behaviour-driven cyber-physical systems.

We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in the United States and Canada, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, we reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

We offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.

As a preliminary to the proof of the Hasse–Arf theorem in the next chapter, the trace mapping of differential forms with log pole is constructed and studied. The construction is based on a logarithmic variant of that in the book Residues and Duality. In the last section, the general construction is applied to inseparable extensions of fields of positive characteristic.

This chapter examines representations of wedding attire in a popular, though now defunct, feminist wedding blog, A Practical Wedding. The analysis compares two genres: posts sponsored by apparel brands and posts contributed by people about their own weddings. I argue that the two genres underline two forms of feminist personhood. On one hand, we find the rhetoric of neoliberal individuation, whereby the role of clothing is to help wearers present their best selves, wholly unfettered by others and their expectations. On the contrary, wedding accounts authored by readers-turned-contributors outline a model of clothing that is networked and connects the wearer to others alive and dead. I argue that the cleavage between these two models of dressed selfhood maps on to divergent impulses – toward individualism and being-in-relation – in contemporary feminism. Ultimately, the model of “haunting” by others that is implied by first-person accounts of dressing for the wedding provides a model for thinking about the ghosting of neoliberal feminism by relational ethics.

Classic studies of English fiction and social life often depict romantic marriage and marriage novels as rising in tandem, with each propelling the other all the way to the moment of Jane Austen or even to the early twentieth-century era of modernist experiment and legal divorce. Capitalizing on this collection’s attention to micro-chronologies, this chapter, however, engages with a set of domestic fictions, by William Godwin, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and others, that for a brief interval consciously dispensed with the premise that marriage was crucial for narrative completion. Widening the collection’s geographic focus, I consider this set of English works alongside the novels of the Swiss-French Germaine de Staël, an inclusion that helps underscore how some of the challenges posed in the 1800s to the narrative grammar of the novel originated with the French Revolution and with revolutionary jurists’ liberalization of the laws regarding marriage and its dissolution.