You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March, 2009.
A recently copied article from 1839 on the birth of photography
The Daguerrotipe (sic)
The following is an extract from a private letter of professor S. F. B. Morse to the editor of the Observer, dated Paris, March 9th.
“You have perhaps heard of the Daguerrotipe, so called from the discoverer, M. Daguerro. It is one of the most beautiful discoveries of the age. I don’t know if you recollect some experiments of min in New Haven, many years ago, when I had my painting room next to professor Silliman’s, experiments to ascertain if it were possible to fix the image of the Camera Obscura. I was able to produce different degrees of shade on paper, dipped into a solution of nitrate of silver, by means of different degrees of light; but finding that light produced dark, and dark light, I presumed the production of a true image to be impracticable, and gave up the attempt. M. Daguerro has realised in the most exquisite manner this idea.
“A few days ago I addressed a note to M. D. requesting, as a stranger, the favor to see his results and inviting him in turn to see my telegraph. I was politely invited to see them under these circumstances, for he had determined not to show them again, until the cambers had passed definitely on a proposition for the government to purchase the secret of the discovery, and make it public. The day before yesterday, the 7th, I called on M. Daguerro, at his rooms in the diorama, to see these admirable results.
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In the fifteenth century, the verb veoir and the vernacular phrase “to read with the heart” (lire au coeur) were used in French aristocratic texts to refer to private, silent reading, much as in earlier centuries videre, “to see,” and inspicere, “to gaze,” had been used as alternatives to legere, “to read.” At the same time, the word ecrire, “to write,” became, like scribere, its Latin equivalent, synonymous with composition.”
Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (California: Stanford, 1997). p. 268.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to mark the achievements of women in science and technology. I signed the pledge to post a while back – my second daughter just escaped being called Ada or Augusta – and have been thinking for the last twenty four hours as to what to write. (I am in the midst of trying to finish a chapter, so have little headroom space for much beyond a twenty-four hour period.)
In tracing my own work as an academic researcher and writer in, what for argument’s sake, I will call the history of science and technology, I went back to my bookcase to find those who had set me on this path. Here then is a post to the three female historians of science and technology whose work not only shifted the way I think about the world but also made me want to follow them down the path they had hacked through the jungle of the history of science and technology as it has long stood, as history-of-scientists-and-scientific-ideas and/or history-of-machines. (Another name could be ‘history-of-science-and-technology-without-culture’.) Last, but not least, these three women are all exceptional writers: elegant, intricate and always writing for a reader, features which are oftentimes hard to find in academe.
- Sadie Plant.
I bought her book Zeroes and Ones many moons ago, whilst studying for an undergraduate degree in maths and philosophy, when computers were just noticeably on the rise in the UK. Written in sections, sometimes a paragraph long, sometimes a few pages, Sadie Plant zooms in and out, back and forth, in the (his/her)story of weaving and computing, through the work of Jacquard, Lovelace and Babbage. It was the first book I ever read about Ada and switched my mind on to constructions of gender stereotypes, the relationship between the genealogy of words and the genealogy of practices and how histories can be written as aesthetically as any narrative can be; how history can be literary and experimental as any novel. I have re-read this book at least once a year since I bought it – it is covered in post-it notes, marginalia and a huge variety of knocks and scrapes. One of my most well-loved books. - N. Katherine Hayles
How We Became Posthuman was one of the starting texts for my PhD project. A scientist turned cultural historian and theorist, Hayles’ work is just breathtaking – her writing is always smart, her thinking vastly engaging. - Jessica Riskin
I first came across Jessica Riskin at the start of my research project with her two brilliant articles on Eighteenth Century Automata, ‘The Defecating Duck, or The Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life’ (Critical Inquiry, v.20, no.4, 2003) and ‘Eighteenth Century Wetware’ (Representations, no. 83, 2003). I have read and re-read her work a number of times, always finding a new thought as I read them. She recently edited Genesis Redux, which is a great collection of essays on history and philosophy of artificial life.
Thanks to them all. And thanks to Ada.
The Wire as Social Science Fiction? (Call for Papers)
Leeds Town Hall, UK, 26 – 27 November 2009
The HBO TV series The Wire premiered in the USA on June 2, 2002 and ended on March 9, 2008, with 60 episodes airing over the course of its 5 seasons. Set in Baltimore, Maryland, USA it has a huge cast of over 300 characters. The ‘star’ of the show is the city – a simulated post-industrial every town – within which the interactions between the drugs economy, race, the criminal justice system, the polity, globalisation processes, the changing class structure, the education system and the (new and old) media are examined in minute detail. It has never been screened on terrestrial TV in the UK but it has received widespread media attention, especially from The Guardian newspaper. It has sold well on DVD and has developed a cult status, especially amongst media literate audiences with aspirations towards more critical social and cultural sensibilities. It has been critically acclaimed not just as a complex piece of ‘entertainment’ but also as a profoundly ‘sociological’ piece of TV, invoking a renewed sense of the ‘sociological imagination’ amongst many. The eminent Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson recently said of the series: ‘The Wire’s exploration of sociological themes is truly exceptional. Indeed I do not hesitate to say that it has done more to enhance our understandings of the challenges of urban life and urban inequality than any other media event or scholarly publication including studies by social scientists’. The University of Columbia (rogue) sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, has produced a widely read (freakonomics) blog reporting on how the series was received and interpreted by New York drugs gangs. The Savage Minds anthropology blog has extensively debated the question: ‘Is The Wire our best ethnographic text on the U.S.today?’
Plenary Speaker: Prof. Peter Moskos (CUNY), author of Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District (Princeton University Press, 2008).
We are also seeking papers that utilise The Wire either as a topic or as a resource for the social sciences and the humanities. We welcome papers from any disciplinary context and on any subject. We hope to generate a programme that will appeal to those with an interest in, inter alia: area regeneration; celebrity; criminology; drugs; class analysis; education; gender and sexualities; film and TV studies; globalisation; journalism; language and interaction; media studies; organisational studies; policing; policy studies; politics; ‘race’ and ethnicities; social and political philosophy; simulation and simulacra; surveillance studies; urban studies; and violence. We are also interested in papers that examine the role of literature, fiction and other cultural phenomena more generally that are generative of a contemporary sociological imagination.
The conference fee is likely to be in the order of £125 (Full) or £60 (concessions) for the two days inclusive of lunch.
The conference is co-hosted by The ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), University of Manchester and the Open University & The Department of Sociology, the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, and the Taylor & Francis Journal Information, Communication & Society, University of York & The Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law, University of Leeds.
Please submit a 250 word abstract for individual papers (30 minutes long) by the 31 July 2009. Proposal Forms are available online and should be sent to: Wire Conference Administration, 178 Waterloo Place, Oxford Road, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, Tel: +44(0)161 275 8985 / Fax: +44(0)161 275 8985.
It is said that love is the inventor of drawing. He might also unfortunately have invented speech; dissatisfied with it, love spurns it, for there are more active ways of expressing oneself. She who so lovingly traced the shadow of her Lover had such things to impart! What sounds did she use to achieve these movements with her stick?
Rousseau, Essai sur l’origin des langues, 1781.
Northumbria University is looking for a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer/Reader in Design History.
The second article of the About Images series on the Nomadikon site is a piece by Keith Moxey on Bruegel, examining how images demand at the same time as they resist.
2010 Oral History Society Annual Conference: 2-3 July, 2010, held in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and National Life Stories at the British Library.
Oral history has become a significant methodology for understanding the contexts of art and design practices. Interviews with individuals involved in creative practices as producers, consumers or mediators are providing access to undocumented and alternative histories in the arts. This international conference will bring together the global community of those working with oral history in the fields of architecture, art, craft and design (incorporating fashion, product design, photography, and new media).
Increasing numbers of community projects are now exploring their histories through testimony-based art, craft and design activities. And with the growing use of web-based communication, designers, artists, historians and other arts-based researchers are also engaging with the problem of creating appropriate environments in which oral histories can be stored and disseminated to different audiences and users. The relationship between content and form is one that researchers in art and design are particularly well-placed to explore.
Rather than privileging the authorial voice in the arts, the conference seeks to examine the meaning and function of oral history in creative practice. The conference will, therefore, focus on three major themes: History, Practice, and Interpretation.
History
The contribution of oral history to the documentation and preservation of creative practices; the creation of creative identities through oral history narratives; the interconnections between the individual practitioner and their wider cultural context; the narratives of creativity; the construction of alternative histories; memories of lost practices.
Practice
Creative practice using oral history and memory work; designers as mediators in oral history projects/works; ethical considerations in using individual memories for art/design work; the use of images as memory prompts; arts-based community oral history projects; oral history as visual narrative.
Interpretation
Oral history as producer of meaning; oral history and testimony in the museum and gallery; narrative research in the arts and oral history; oral history and arts education; the problem of oral history as biography; the border between orality, aurality, and visuality.
Proposals are invited of 200-250 words that address one of the three major themes of the conference for talks or presentations of 20 minutes, or panels of one hour. Proposals should clearly state how oral history has informed the project/work/research described, and how it will be used in the presentation. Please send to Belinda Waterman, [Record] [Create] conference administrator, email by 30 November 2009.
Partners:
Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London
National Life Stories at The British Library Sound Archive
University of the West of England, Bristol
The term ‘text’ derives from the root word meaning to weave. Thus, oral discourse can be thought of as weaving or stitching: or rhapsodic, meaning to stitch songs together.
Gloria Latham, “The Bookcase at the End of the Thesis: Revisioning a Literature Review“, Journal of Educational Enquiry, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2004. p.105-115.
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