Craig Robertson – författare

In today's world of constant identification checks, it's difficult to recall that there was ever a time when "proof of identity" was not a part of everyday life. And as anyone knows who has ever lost a passport, or let one expire on the eve of international travel, the passport has become an indispensable document. But how and why did this form of identification take on such a crucial role?In the first history of the passport in the United States, Craig Robertson offers an illuminating account of how this document, above all others, came to be considered a reliable answer to the question: who are you? Historically, the passport originated as an official letter of introduction addressed to foreign governments on behalf of American travelers, but as Robertson shows, it became entangled in contemporary negotiations over citizenship and other forms of identity documentation. Prior to World War I, passports were not required to cross American borders, and while some people struggled to understand how a passport could accurately identify a person, others took advantage of this new document to advance claims for citizenship. From the strategic use of passport applications by freed slaves and a campaign to allow married women to get passports in their maiden names, to the "passport nuisance" of the 1920s and the contested addition of photographs and other identification technologies on the passport, Robertson sheds new light on issues of individual and national identity in modern U.S. history.In this age of heightened security, especially at international borders, Robertson's The Passport in America provides anyone interested in questions of identification and surveillance with a richly detailed, and often surprising, history of this uniquely important document.

In today's world of constant identification checks, it's difficult to recall that there was ever a time when "proof of identity" was not a part of everyday life. And as anyone knows who has ever lost a passport, or let one expire on the eve of international travel, the passport has become an indispensable document. But how and why did this form of identification take on such a crucial role?In the first history of the passport in the United States, Craig Robertson offers an illuminating account of how this document, above all others, came to be considered a reliable answer to the question: who are you? Historically, the passport originated as an official letter of introduction addressed to foreign governments on behalf of American travelers, but as Robertson shows, it became entangled in contemporary negotiations over citizenship and other forms of identity documentation. Prior to World War I, passports were not required to cross American borders, and while some people struggled to understand how a passport could accurately identify a person, others took advantage of this new document to advance claims for citizenship. From the strategic use of passport applications by freed slaves and a campaign to allow married women to get passports in their maiden names, to the "passport nuisance" of the 1920s and the contested addition of photographs and other identification technologies on the passport, Robertson sheds new light on issues of individual and national identity in modern U.S. history.In this age of heightened security, especially at international borders, Robertson's The Passport in America provides anyone interested in questions of identification and surveillance with a richly detailed, and often surprising, history of this uniquely important document.

By the time readers encounter academic history in the form of books and articles, all that tends to be left of an author’s direct experience with archives is pages of endnotes. Whether intentionally or not, archives have until recently been largely thought of as discrete collections of documents, perhaps not neutral but rarely considered to be historical actors.This book brings together top media scholars to rethink the role of the archive and historical record from the perspective of writing media history. Exploring the concept of the archive forces a reconsideration of what counts as historical evidence. In this analysis the archive becomes a concept that allows the authors to think about the acts of classifying, collecting, storing, and interpreting the sources used in historical research. The essays included in this volume, from Susan Douglas, Lisa Gitelman, John Nerone, Jeremy Packer, Paddy Scannell, Lynn Spigel, and Jonathan Sterne, focus on both the theoretical and practical ways in which the archive has affected how media is thought about as an object for historical analysis.This book was published as a special issue of The Communication Review.

Don't miss WATCH HIM DIE, the latest edge-of-your-seat thriller that is 'truly difficult to put down' (Daily Mail) from Sunday Times bestselling author Craig Robertson - available to order now!A murder investigation frozen in time begins to melt . . .NOVEMBER 1993. Scotland is in the grip of an ice-cold winter and the Lake of Menteith is frozen over. A young man and woman walk across the ice to the historic island of Inchmahome which lies in the middle of the lake. Only the man returns. In the spring, as staff prepare the abbey ruins for summer visitors, they discover the body of a girl, her skull violently crushed.PRESENT DAY. Retired detective Alan Narey is still haunted by the unsolved crime. Desperate to relieve her ailing father's conscience, DS Rachel Narey risks her job and reputation by returning to the Lake of Menteith and unofficially reopening the cold case.With the help of police photographer Tony Winter, Rachel prepares a dangerous gambit to uncover the killer's identity - little knowing who that truly is. Despite the freezing temperatures, the ice cold case begins to thaw, and with it a tide of secrets long frozen in time are suddenly and shockingly unleashed.Brilliant crime fiction for fans of Stuart MacBride and Ian Rankin, Craig Robertson's latest thriller, Watch Him Die, was nominated for the McIlvanney Prize 2020 for Scottish Crime Book of the Year.  Praise for Craig Robertson:'Robertson is doing for Glasgow what Rankin did for Edinburgh' Mirror'I can't recommend this book highly enough' MARTINA COLE'Brace yourself to be horrified and hooked' EVA DOLAN'Fantastic characterisation, great plotting, page-turning and gripping. The best kind of intelligent and moving crime fiction writing' LUCA VESTE'Really enjoyed Murderabilia - disturbing, inventive, and powerfully and stylishly written. Recommended' STEVE MOSBY'A great murder mystery witha  brilliantly realised setting and deftly painted characters' JAMES OSWALD'Takes a spine-tingling setting and an original storyline and adds something more' Scottish Daily Record'A perfectly constrcuted police procedural with real psychological depth' Crimefictionlover

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF RANDOM AND MURDERABILIA - DS Rachel Narey must bring a serial killer to justice. Scotland 1972.Glasgow is haunted by a murderer nicknamed Red Silk - a feared serial killer who selects his victims in the city's nightclubs. The case remains unsolved but Archibald Atto, later imprisoned for other murders, is thought to be Red Silk.In modern-day Glasgow, DS Rachel Narey is called to a gruesome crime scene at the city's Necropolis. The body of a young woman lies stretched out over a tomb. Her body bears a three-letter message from her killer.Now retired, former detective Danny Neilson spots a link between the new murder and those he investigated in 1972 - details that no copycat killer could have known about. But Atto is still behind bars. Determined finally to crack the case, Danny, along with his nephew, police photographer Tony Winter, pays Atto a visit. But they soon discover that they are going to need the combined efforts of police forces past and present to bring a twisted killer to justice.Brilliant crime fiction for fans of Stuart MacBride and Ian Rankin, Craig Robertson's debut thriller Random was shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger. Praise for Craig Robertson:'Robertson is doing for Glasgow what Rankin did for Edinburgh' Mirror'I can't recommend this book highly enough' MARTINA COLE'Brace yourself to be horrified and hooked' EVA DOLAN'Fantastic characterisation, great plotting, page-turning and gripping. The best kind of intelligent and moving crime fiction writing' LUCA VESTE'Really enjoyed Murderabilia - disturbing, inventive, and powerfully and stylishly written. Recommended' STEVE MOSBY'A great murder mystery witha  brilliantly realised setting and deftly painted characters' JAMES OSWALD'Takes a spine-tingling setting and an original storyline and adds something more' Scottish Daily Record'A perfectly constrcuted police procedural with real psychological depth' Crimefictionlover

Written by leading researchers, the 2nd Edition of the Dictionary of Computer Vision & Image Processing is a comprehensive and reliable resource which now provides explanations of over 3500 of the most commonly used terms across image processing, computer vision and related fields including machine vision. It offers clear and concise definitions with short examples or mathematical precision where necessary for clarity that ultimately makes it a very usable reference for new entrants to these fields at senior undergraduate and graduate level, through to early career researchers to help build up knowledge of key concepts. As the book is a useful source for recent terminology and concepts, experienced professionals will also find it a valuable resource for keeping up to date with the latest advances.New features of the 2nd Edition: Contains more than 1000 new terms, notably an increased focus on image processing and machine vision terms;Includes the addition of reference links across the majority of terms pointing readers to further information about the concept under discussion so that they can continue to expand their understanding;Now available as an eBook with enhanced content: approximately 50 videos to further illustrate specific terms; active cross-linking between terms so that readers can easily navigate from one related term to another and build up a full picture of the topic in question; and hyperlinked references to fully embed the text in the current literature.

By the time readers encounter academic history in the form of books and articles, all that tends to be left of an author’s direct experience with archives is pages of endnotes. Whether intentionally or not, archives have until recently been largely thought of as discrete collections of documents, perhaps not neutral but rarely considered to be historical actors.This book brings together top media scholars to rethink the role of the archive and historical record from the perspective of writing media history. Exploring the concept of the archive forces a reconsideration of what counts as historical evidence. In this analysis the archive becomes a concept that allows the authors to think about the acts of classifying, collecting, storing, and interpreting the sources used in historical research. The essays included in this volume, from Susan Douglas, Lisa Gitelman, John Nerone, Jeremy Packer, Paddy Scannell, Lynn Spigel, and Jonathan Sterne, focus on both the theoretical and practical ways in which the archive has affected how media is thought about as an object for historical analysis.This book was published as a special issue of The Communication Review.

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF RANDOM AND MURDERABILIA - John Callum is fleeing his past, but has run straight into danger.When John Callum arrives on the wild and desolate Faroe Islands, he vows to sever all ties with his previous life. He desperately wants to make a new start, and is surprised by how quickly he is welcomed into the close-knit community. But still, the terrifying, debilitating nightmares just won't stop.Then the solitude is shattered by an almost unheard of crime on the islands: murder. A specialist team of detectives arrives from Denmark to help the local police, who seem completely ill-equipped for an investigation of this scale. But as tensions rise, and the community closes rank to protect its own, John has to watch his back.But far more disquieting than that, John's nightmares have taken an even more disturbing turn, and he can't be certain about the one thing he needs to know above all else. Whether he is the killer …Brilliant crime fiction for fans of Stuart MacBride and Ian Rankin, Craig Robertson's debut thriller Random was shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger.   Praise for Craig Robertson:'Robertson is doing for Glasgow what Rankin did for Edinburgh' Mirror'I can't recommend this book highly enough' MARTINA COLE'Brace yourself to be horrified and hooked' EVA DOLAN'Fantastic characterisation, great plotting, page-turning and gripping. The best kind of intelligent and moving crime fiction writing' LUCA VESTE'Really enjoyed Murderabilia - disturbing, inventive, and powerfully and stylishly written. Recommended' STEVE MOSBY'A great murder mystery witha  brilliantly realised setting and deftly painted characters' JAMES OSWALD'Takes a spine-tingling setting and an original storyline and adds something more' Scottish Daily Record'A perfectly constrcuted police procedural with real psychological depth' Crimefictionlover

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF RANDOM AND MURDERABILIA, a tense and gripping crime novel set in the dark underbelly of Glasgow.A young man enters the culverted remains of an ancient Glasgow stream, looking for thrills. Deep below the city, it is decaying and claustrophobic and gets more so with every step. As the ceiling lowers to no more than a couple of feet above the ground, the man finds his path blocked by another person. Someone with his throat cut.As DS Rachel Narey leads the official investigation, photographer Tony Winter follows a lead of his own, through the shadowy world of urbexers, people who pursue a dangerous and illegal hobby, a world that Winter knows more about than he lets on. And it soon becomes clear that the murderer has killed before, and has no qualms about doing so again.'A tense torch-lit trek through a hidden city you never knew existed' Christopher BrookmyreBrilliant crime fiction for fans of Stuart MacBride and Ian Rankin, Craig Robertson's debut thriller Random was shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger.   Praise for Craig Robertson:'Robertson is doing for Glasgow what Rankin did for Edinburgh' Mirror'I can't recommend this book highly enough' MARTINA COLE'Brace yourself to be horrified and hooked' EVA DOLAN'Fantastic characterisation, great plotting, page-turning and gripping. The best kind of intelligent and moving crime fiction writing' LUCA VESTE'Really enjoyed Murderabilia - disturbing, inventive, and powerfully and stylishly written. Recommended' STEVE MOSBY'A great murder mystery witha  brilliantly realised setting and deftly painted characters' JAMES OSWALD'Takes a spine-tingling setting and an original storyline and adds something more' Scottish Daily Record'A perfectly constrcuted police procedural with real psychological depth' Crimefictionlover

*** LONGLISTED FOR THE THEAKSTONS OLD PECULIER CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2017 ****** LONGLISTED FOR THE McILVANNEY PRIZE 2017 ***'I can't recommend this book highly enough' MARTINA COLEThe first commuter train of the morning slowly rumbles away from platform seven of Queen St station. And then, as the train emerges from a tunnel, the screaming starts. Hanging from the bridge ahead of them is a body. Placed neatly on the ground below him are the victim's clothes. Why?Detective Inspector Narey is assigned the case and then just as quickly taken off it again. Winter, now a journalist, must pursue the case for her. The line of questioning centres around the victim's clothes - why leave them in full view? And what did the killer not leave, and where might it appear again?Everyone has a hobby. Some people collect death. To find this evil, Narey must go on to the dark web, and into immense danger ...'Takes the reader on a wickedly entertaining ride through a fascinatingly sinister world' Sunday Mirror'Brace yourself to be horrified and hooked' EVA DOLAN'Fantastic characterisation, great plotting, page-turning and gripping. The best kind of intelligent and moving crime fiction writing' LUCA VESTE'Really enjoyed Murderabilia - disturbing, inventive, and powerfully and stylishly written. Recommended' STEVE MOSBY

'Brilliantly and sensitively written' Steve Cavanagh, bestselling author of Thirteen'Craig Robertson’s Narey and Winter series goes from strength to strength, and this latest instalment is the most compelling. Brace yourself to be horrified and hooked' Eva Dolan, acclaimed author of This is How it EndsThe sergeant took some from each box and spread them around the floor so they could all see. Dozens upon dozens of them. DI Rachel Narey’s guess was that there were a few hundred in all. Photographs.Many of them were in crowd scenes, some just sitting on a park bench or walking a dog or waiting for a bus or working in shops. They seemed to have no idea they’d been photographed.A dawn raid on the home of a suspected rapist leads to a chilling discovery, a disturbing collection hidden under floorboards. Narey is terrified at the potential scale of what they’ve found and of what brutalities it may signal.When the photographs are ruled inadmissible as evidence and the man walks free from court, Narey knows she’s let down the victim she’d promised to protect and a monster is back on the streets.Tony Winter’s young family is under threat from internet trolls and he is determined to protect them whatever the cost. He and Narey are in a race against time to find the unknown victims of the photographer’s lens – before he strikes again.Praise for Craig Robertson:'I can't recommend this book highly enough' Martina Cole'Fantastic characterisation, great plotting, page-turning and gripping. The best kind of intelligent and moving crime fiction writing' Luca Veste'Really enjoyed Murderabilia - disturbing, inventive, and powerfully and stylishly written. Recommended' Steve Mosby

The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with informationThe ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work. In the first in-depth history of this neglected artifact, Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used.Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information.Robertson’s unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an “automatic memory” machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women’s nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today’s digital world.

The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with informationThe ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work. In the first in-depth history of this neglected artifact, Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used.Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information.Robertson’s unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an “automatic memory” machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women’s nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today’s digital world.

Pass the hammer to a new generation! This kid-friendly guide covers the essentials of carpentry, including the proper way to drive a nail, the safe way to drill a hole, and the importance of measuring. You’ll be amazed at how fast your miniature carpenter acquires the skills to complete 15 projects that include game boards, play sets, lemonade stands, birdhouses, equine sawhorses, and more. Young crafters will be ready for the woodshop in no time.