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A media history of the material and infrastructural features of networking practices, a German classic translated for the first time into English. Nets hold, connect, and catch. They ensnare, bind, and entangle. Our social networks owe their name to a conceivably strange and ambivalent object. But how did the net get into the network? And how can it reasonably represent the connectedness of people, things, institutions, signs, infrastructures, and even nature? The Connectivity of Things by Sebastian Giessmann, the first media history that addresses the overwhelming diversity of networks, attempts to answer all these questions and more. Reconstructing the decisive moments in which networking ...
Traces a commonplace average—sea level—from its origins in charting land to its emergence as a symbol of global warming. News reports warn of rising sea levels spurred by climate change. Waters inch ever higher, disrupting delicate ecosystems and threatening island and coastal communities. The baseline for these measurements—sea level—may seem unremarkable, a long-familiar zero point for altitude. But as Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveals, the history of defining and measuring sea level is intertwined with national ambitions, commercial concerns, and shifting relationships between people and the ocean. Sea Level provides a detailed and innovative account of how mean sea level was firs...
Theatre Across Oceans: Mediators Of Transatlantic Exchange allows the reader to enter and understand the infrastructural 'backstage area' of global cultural mobility during the years between 1890 and 1925. Located within the research fields of global history and theory, the geographical focus of the book is a transatlantic one, based on the active exchange in this phase between North and South America and Europe. Emanating from a rich body of archival material, the study argues that this exchange was essentially facilitated and controlled by professional theatrical mediators (agents, brokers), who have not been sufficiently researched within theatre or historical studies. The low visibility of mediators in the scientific research is in diametrical contrast to the enormous power that they possessed in the period dealt with in this book.
In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the...
The volume investigates the socio-material dimension and media practices of cooperation – before, during and beyond situations. Cooperation is understood as reciprocal interplay operating with or without consensus, in co-presence or absence of the involved actors in distributed situations. Artefacts, bodies, texts and infrastructures are the media that make cooperation possible. They enable and configure reciprocal accomplishments – and are themselves created through media practices in cooperative situations.
In this volume, leading scholars of photography and media examine photography’s vital role in the evolution of media and communication in the nineteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the introduction of telegraphy, the development of a cheaper and more reliable postal service, the rise of the mass-circulation press, and the emergence of the railway dramatically changed the way people communicated and experienced time and space. Concurrently, photography developed as a medium that changed how images were produced and circulated. Yet, for the most part, photography of the era is studied outside the field of media history. The contributors to this volume challenge thos...
European archives hold historical voice recordings that were produced by linguists, ethnologists and musicologists during colonial rule in African countries. While these recordings reverberate with the polyphonic echoes of colonial knowledge production, to date, acoustic collections have rarely been consulted as sources of colonial history. In this book Anette Hoffmann engages with a Southern African audio-visual collection, which is located in five different institutions across Vienna, Austria. Several recordings collected by the anthropologist Rudolf Pch in August 1908 have been retranslated for this book. These translations provide new insights into Pchs collecting expedition to the Kalahari. Pchs narrative of his heroic journey is called into question by the Naro speakers comments, which address colonial violence and criticise the research practices of the anthropologist. By attending to the spoken texts on the recordings and reconnecting them to photographs, ethnographic objects, archival documentation and Pchs travelogue, Hoffmann offers a different reading of this research trip into a war zone.triesries.
Offering a sweeping transatlantic perspective, this book explains the current obsession with automobiles by delving deep into the motives of early car users. It provides a synthesis of our knowledge about the emergence and persistence of the car, using a broad range of material including novels, poems, films, and songs ...
Enacting the Worlds of Cinema offers a substantial reconfiguration of the textual roots of modern film narratology. By giving sustained attention to cinema's material-affective modes of communicating its stories and embedding its audience in atmospheric, kinetic, and multisensorial worlds, this book maintains that film narratives are less representations than they are enactments; brought forth through the interactions of the felt body and the film material. The book defends this enactive and media-anthropological thesis by reworking a series of established film narratological key concepts including the diegesis, mood/atmosphere, and the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic sound. In the process, this book draws on a wide range of contemporary theoretical resources such as affective neuroscience, media-philosophy, philosophy of mind, atmosphere research, multisensory perception theory as well as a broad selection of films including Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Ruttmann, 1927), The Cranes are Flying (Kalatozov, 1957) and Happy as Lazzaro (Rohrwacher, 2018).