Similar Journals
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Technology and Culture
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.284  Number of Followers: 34  Subscription journalISSN (Print) 0040-165X - ISSN (Online) 1097-3729 Published by Project MUSE  [305 journals]
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- On the Cover: Speculations with Vaginal Specula
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Abstract: In the 1940 photograph, the woman working in the workshop is sitting beside and examining one of the objects in the pile, a cow vaginal speculum. The center of this scene is staged. The shiny specula are arranged neatly on dark, silky cloth for contrast—and by turning to one side, the worker invites the camera into the scene. Separated from the woman and the specula by a chicken wire, the background is out of focus and not fully informative: a bottle partially wrapped, a hat on a hook, and several boxes and packages on wooden shelves. The blurry background helps direct the viewer's gaze to the relationship between the worker and the products in the sharply defined foreground. She holds the metal device in both ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Introducing Bovine Regimes: When Animals Become Technologies
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Abstract: In the autumn of her life, the cow Stavit (autumnal, in Hebrew) stopped being a technology. She was allowed to retire as an unproductive creature in a specially built home. This followed seventeen years of exceptional compliance to having her bodily production regulated and monitored. She lactated at two and a half, following her first pregnancy in 1935, and thereafter was made pregnant annually for continuous milk flow. Stavit was an early generation crossbreed—a Dutch bull with a Syrian cow—forming the Jewish settler colonial dairy industry in British Palestine. Unlike her ancestors in Europe, who were milked twice a day, her body became accustomed to the rhythm of three times. She excelled in these tempos for an ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Camera and the Cattle: Bovine Photography and Technologies of
"Improvement" in Colonial South India-
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Abstract: Bound into a file in the British Library in London is a remarkable set of eight photographs. They show cows. More precisely, they show prizewinning bulls, cows, and heifers exhibited at the cattle fair held at Addanki in the Nellore district of the Madras Presidency in south India on January 25–26, 1865 (see figure 1).1 The Addanki images defy scholarly attempts to constrain the photography of Victorian India within the conventional parameters ofFig 1A Model Breed. A typical bovine photograph taken in British India by Alexander Hunter, showing a prize winning bull of the Ongole breed, at Addanki, 1865. Note the white sheet placed behind the bull and its keeper to give greater clarity to the animal's profile, a ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Sex Panic and the Productive Infertility of the Freemartin
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Abstract: Simple technologies can be used to reveal complicated phenomena.1 As part of their DIY tool kit, farmers routinely employ a simple BIC ballpoint pen to detect intersex cows: "We were taught to use a BIC pen to test freemartin heifer calves by one of our vets," writes a user on the online agricultural community Farming Forum (TFF).2 A farmer's early diagnosis of freemartinismFig 1Representing Indeterminacy. Scientific representation of the reproductive organs of Case 44, a seven-week-old freemartin born twin to a male. Farmers and scientists have studied the freemartin's indeterminacy for a long time. (Source: Frank R. Lillie, "The Free-Martin: A Study of the Action of Sex Hormones in the Foetal Life of Cattle," ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Cows and Humans as Technology Users: Multispecies Agency and Gender in
Automated Milking Systems in Finland-
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Abstract: Innovative technologies have the potential to make food production more efficient.1 Over the past fifty years, technologizing animal husbandry has accelerated all over the world.2 Researchers have understood automation and digital tools as solutions to environmental and labor shortage problems: digitalization arguably gives farmers more precise information about production processes, enabling more accurate investments. Moreover, automation may save working hours, reduce the workload, and increase productivity. At the same time, scholars have pointed out that technologization can cause soil pollution, unequal accumulation of capital, and exploitation of immigrant workers. Increased technologization in breeding ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Skin and Sound: Caring for and Crafting Bovine Hide in South India
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Abstract: Musical instrument makers from the hamlet Valangaiman in the Thiruvarur district of Tamil Nadu state travel long distances across southern India to select the appropriate bovine hide for making their instruments.1 They invest considerable time and money to get the best possible material for producing a consistently perfect sound from their instrument. For some, the animal is a religious symbol.2 For many, it is a livelihood. Through instruments like parai and thavil, musicians in South India have a direct relationship with bovines.3 The processing of bovine materials, including milk, ghee, dung, and fertilizer, does not cease when they die: they provide instrument makers with thol (the Tamil word for animal hide) ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Maintaining Bovine
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Abstract: Stavit, the Nelore cows, the Finnish cow with her robot, the freemartin.2 When imagining these bovines in the previous narratives of this special issue, a standard might first come to mind: straight or humped back, long neck, big eyes, broad nose; a long tail snapping back and forth; and a breathy bellow or chew of the cud. The bovine is very much a presence in these historical and contemporary cases—at one time, or still alive and likely kicking at the flies, buckets, or photographers that spooked them or stood in their way. Each bovine is an actor in their own story.That standard, that image, is persistent: a placeholder of what this cow, heifer, calf, bull, or steer might have been in that moment—a breed ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Do Microscopes Have Politics' Gendering the Electron Microscope in
Laboratory Biological Research-
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Abstract: The University of Leeds early on received a Radio Corporation of America (RCA) microscope, courtesy of the U.S. Lend-Lease scheme. This was a "physical" instrument physicists designed and operated on the principles of physics: it implied that only a physicist could use one. The electron microscope was also such a huge and unwieldly instrument that it required the physique of a gorilla to operate successfully.1 Brute "physical" strength and sharp "physical" know-how were the prerequisites of a bona fide electron microscopist. And, when required in strict combination, these attributes were far more likely found in men than in women. It did not necessarily mean that one had to apply the "physical" know-how consistent ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Shaping Communications: The Development of the National Telegraph Network
in Ireland, 1850–70-
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Abstract: Ireland's telegraph system transformed between 1850 and 1868. Private enterprise developed a network that stretched across the island, connecting Ireland directly to North America, Britain, and the emerging global telegraph system. In the process, telegraphy dramatically altered trade, news, and governance operations across Ireland. Despite its impact, our understanding of how the early Irish telegraph network developed is nascent.1 This is particularly perplexing given the extensive coverage of British telegraphy within the extant historiography.2 Ireland and Britain were politically and increasingly economically unified following the formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Animating History: Digitally Mapping the United States Telegraph System
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Abstract: This article introduces historians of technology to a new reference work and encourages them to use digital maps in research and teaching. The authors have created a digital map, "Uniting the States with Telegraphs, 1844–1862," that shows the development of the telegraph system in the United States from its inception in 1844 to the completion of a transcontinental telegraph system in 1862. In addition to locating offices and lines, the map displays data that put the telegraph system in its political, social, and environmental contexts. The map is available for free online.1 As far as the authors know, this is the first born-digital map of a telegraph system anywhere in the world.2The map displays many kinds of data ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Introducing the Act of Looking at Technology-in-Operation
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Abstract: What does it mean to look at technology' When considering the act of looking, we often see technology as merely an objective means of reproduction, a photographic process. Shifting the focus, this Public History section of Technology and Culture asks the following: What forms of looking are needed for observing technology-in-operation' What happens when technology becomes the subject of our shared visual experience' The section follows historian James W. Cook's observation that the act of looking is not "a mere condition of sentience" to be "treated in vaguely universalist terms" but instead "varies considerably across eras, institutions, media, social groups and even nations."1 Through interrogating specific forms ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Eye Appeal Is Buy Appeal
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Abstract: The visual appeal of color has become the key driver in American food business. The color of food has played a crucial role for human beings across cultures for millennia—in ancient Egypt, for example, coloring food with dyes was common practice.1 However, the industrialization of food processing and agriculture in the late nineteenth century, combined with the transformation of food distribution and retailing, dramatically changed the function of color. For the food industry, the management of color became a crucial part of production and marketing. Through case studies of oranges and fresh meat, this essay analyzes how food producers and retailers sought to create a standardized color of food, which many ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Why Don't We Look at Television'
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Abstract: Televisions are designed to be looked at. The technological function of a television, as embedded in its name, is to see (vision) things that are far away (tele). In the 1930s, when television was first introduced in Britain as a domestic entertainment device, television viewing was referred to as "looking in," though this soon shifted to a language of viewing that we still use today. Currently, both broadcast television and the television set are described as under threat from extinction as younger smartphone generations favor portable screens and streaming services over a stationary television set. Yet a vast majority of us still sit, evening after evening, staring at the box in the corner of the room (see figure ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Imaging Landscapes, Roads, Race, and Power
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Abstract: The images shown in figures 1 and 2—an urban block of rowhouses with propped-up doors, and a half-finished two-lane road in the countryside—appear not to be related, but they are. Referencing two different locations, one photograph speaks to the technologies of impending destruction, the other to completing construction. Figure 1 captures an urban scene that no longer exists, having been replaced by an urban interstate highway in the U.S. city of Baltimore, Maryland. Figure 2 portrays a stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia. This ostensibly bucolic road is a major tourist magnet; its rural appearance was carefully designed, not simply found.Razing and replacing, redrawing and reordering were hallmarks of ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Beyond Imagined Discontinuity: Review of the Book Series Science and
Civilization in Korea-
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Abstract: The series Science and Civilization in Korea (SCK) represents an ambitious endeavor in Korea's history of technology.1 The series, published in Korean, comprises thirty volumes tracing Korean science and technology, from the earliest hand axes to the innovative twenty-first-century semiconductors. Cambridge University Press intends to publish seven standalone volumes of original research in English, not translations of the Korean series. Finalized in the summer of 2022, this expansive body of work was initiated in 2010 with the backing of the Academy of Korean Studies. Produced over a period of twelve years, the project was coordinated at the Korean Research Institute of Science, Technology, and Civilization within ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Technical Arts in the Han Histories: Tables and Treatises in the Shiji and
Hanshu ed. by Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Michael Nylan (review)-
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Abstract: Much of what we know about the history of imperial China comes down to us through a series of twenty-four state histories, the model for which was established by Sima Qian's Shiji (91 BCE) and Ban Gu's Hanshu (111 CE) under the Han (206 BCE–220 CE). At the core of a state history are imperial annals and individual biographies, to which the Shiji, Hanshu, and some later histories add biao (tables) and shu/zhi (translated "treatises" or "monographs"). The so-called "treatises" are topical state histories of such subjects, in the case of the Shiji and Hanshu, as ceremonial, music, metrology, astronomy, astrology, sacrifices, hydrology, economic administration, law, "five phases" omenology, administrative geography ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Using and Conquering the Watery World in Greco-Roman Antiquity by Georgia
L. Irby (review)-
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Abstract: This book constitutes the second part of a two-volume project by the author. The first monograph, Conceptions of the Watery World in Greco-Roman Antiquity (2021), examines the many ways in which water was embedded in the Greek and Roman mind, from scientific explanations of hydrological phenomena to the centrality of water in ancient Mediterranean myth and religion.The present volume covers a similarly broad chronological, geographical, and cultural landscape, but as the title suggests, it approaches the topic of water from more pragmatic angles. The scope is so encyclopedic that successive sections often read like separate entries only loosely organized thematically. Indeed, like its companion volume, this book ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Technical Knowledge in Europe, 1200–1500 AD ed. by Ricardo Córdoba de
la Llave and Javier López Rider (review)-
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Abstract: This volume originated in a 2015 conference on medieval technological and technical knowledge in Europe held in Cordoba, Spain. The thirteen chapters provide case studies of techniques used in a variety of craft and industrial activities, with an emphasis on the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first half of the volume addresses technical and professional knowledge at the workshop level, including manuscript illumination, woodworking, and the making of cosmetics and perfumes, while the remainder of the book addresses production on a larger, more industrial scale, including charcoal, iron and steel production, alum mining, and the use of water turbines. All the essays are clearly ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks,
Fountains, Labyrinths by Angela Vanhaelen (review)-
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Abstract: This interdisciplinary book by art historian Angela Vanhaelen has much to offer to historians of technology, even though this may not be immediately apparent. The introduction, for instance, frames the study of Amsterdam's early seventeenth-century Doolhoven (mazes) through art-historical debates on the realism or apparent realism of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, as well as in terms of contested claims about eighteenth-century spectatorship. To overcome the limitations of such approaches, Vanhaelen broadens her view on art as also encompassing wonderful creations, studied by historians of early modern technologies. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, some Amsterdam inn keepers decided to put in ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum by Mike
Jones (review)-
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Abstract: In his Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum, Jones suggests the term "relational museum" as a container word for participatory, inclusive, and accessible. In the relational museum, ideally, all kinds of cross-connections between objects and the world in which they originated and functioned are visible and accessible.In the daily practice of most museums, this is by no means the case. The categorization of information reveals its nineteenth-century roots. Different categories coexist, often without direct links. Object registration is key, nowadays mostly digital but an heir to the former index card cataloging, which displayed maker, material, dimensions, provenance, and periodization. In ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- At the Limits of Cure by Bharat Jayram Venkat (review)
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Abstract: In this extraordinary book, Bharat Jayram Venkat deftly interweaves history and mythology, archival material and ethnography, patient case histories and India's political history to investigate the "limits of cure." Specifically, Venkat interrogates the limits of cure through a conceptually and methodologically innovative exploration of a range of "stories" that cut across time and geography: Hindu mythology of Daksha's fury that made the moon wax and wane; the 1950s "Madras Trials" that were not only among the first tuberculosis (TB) clinical trials but also rigorously used this technique to test the efficacy of a medical compound; a TB patient, Nilam, who was declared cured several times, yet TB kept coming ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain
and Mexico, 1850–1940 by Paula A. de la Cruz-Fernández (review)-
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Abstract: De la Cruz-Fernández's Gendered Capitalism is an economic and social history of the Singer sewing machine enterprise and its customers and employees in Spain and Mexico over a ninety-year period. She makes a significant contribution to what has become, in recent decades, a growth industry of scholarship on the sewing machine and its impact, influences, and role as the first consumer durable to be sold on installment credit, including the work of David Arnold ("Global Goods and Local Usages," 2011), Judith Coffin ("Credit, Consumption, and Images of Women's Desires," 1994; and Consumption, Production and Gender, 1996), Wendy Gamber (The Female Economy, 1997), Andrew Godley (Selling the Sewing Machine Around the ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Plasticidade: Plasticity—A History of Plastics in Portugal ed. by Maria
Elvira Callapez, Sara Marques da Cruz, and Vânia Carvalho (review)-
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Abstract: Recent decades have witnessed the appearance of collaborative government-funded projects in the humanities, especially in European nations—a model for scholarship that differs substantially from the traditional model of an individual researcher-writer. This new model has brought humanities projects and their funding more in line with those in the sciences. Plasticidade, a collection of about forty short articles comprising a history of plastics, both in general and in Portugal, is a fascinating hybrid work. In addition to narrating the announced history, the volume also serves as a catalog and permanent record of an exhibition of the same title at the Leiria Museum, a public institution operated by the city of ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births by Michelle
Millar Fisher and Amber Winick (review)-
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Abstract: Designing Motherhood is a stunning volume on the material culture of human reproduction in design history. Arranged in four parts—reproduction, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum—the work collects over a hundred designs that "[remain] so hidden even as they define the everyday experience of so many" (p. 15). Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, with their team of contributing curators, fill the pages with objects that highlight the lived experience of maternity, including newborn ID bracelets, abortion kits, and postpartum mesh underwear, while exploring broader cultural phenomena like breastfeeding, masculine birth, and contemporary social movements like #listentoblackwomen. They mix in interviews with ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Building Medical Schools, Making Doctors: Architecture and the Modern
American Physician by Katherine L. Carroll (review)-
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Abstract: In this fascinating and important book, Katherine Carroll examines the architecture of selected U.S. medical schools from 1893, the year that the Johns Hopkins Medical School opened, through World War II.This book draws upon existing literature about the history of the architecture of patient care facilities, most notably by Annemarie Adams and Jeanne Kisacky, but breaks new ground in its specific attention to facilities for training physicians. While the dramatic change in the form and content of medical education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been explored in a variety of perspectives by a range of medical historians, this is the first book to examine deeply the changes in the physical ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Architecture of Steam: Waterworks and the Victorian Sanitary Crisis by
James Douet (review)-
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Abstract: James Douet's The Architecture of Steam is a richly illustrated and admiring account of the rise and demise of steam-powered waterworks over the course of the long nineteenth century. We remember them today principally for enabling the mass supply of clean drinking water and facilitating the introduction of waterborne sewage systems. Douet is right to celebrate their contribution to solving the Victorian sanitary crisis and overcoming the appalling epidemiological consequences of rampant urbanization and industrialization. The figures are striking. By the 1870s, Mancunians were consuming six times more water per day (some 33 gallons) than their forebears had in the 1840s. By the late 1860s, those who inhabited the ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Imperial Steam: Modernity on the Sea Route to India, 1837–74 by
Jonathan Stafford (review)-
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Abstract: Scholars from Karl Marx to Eric Hobsbawm—or more recently, Jürgen Osterhammel—have rightly centered steam power as the literal engine behind the "Age of Empire" and Industrial Revolution. For historian Jonathan Stafford, the steamship was certainly that—a tool for the logistical maintenance of colonies—but it was something more besides: a subjective experience of mobility and temporality that "normalised" the exotic and in doing so brought the British empire closer to home practically and psychologically. In Imperial Steam, Stafford makes a valuable contribution to the study of technology and its implications for cultures of empire and modernity.Imperial Steam details the history of the "overland route" of the ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Soho Manufactory, Mint and Foundry, West Midlands: Where Boulton, Watt
and Murdoch Made History by George Demidowicz (review)-
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Abstract: Matthew Boulton and James Watt are among the most famous figures in the history of the Industrial Revolution, remembered above all for their development of innovative modes of manufacturing employing the steam engine at the Soho works near Birmingham. (William Murdoch, who later introduced gaslight at Soho, is only slightly less renowned.) Yet as George Demidowicz notes in this book, remarkably little is known about the physical milieus in which these men's innovations occurred, and even less has been done to preserve these places in the British landscape. Demidowicz seeks to address this imbalance, uniting traditional histories of business and technology with the techniques of public history and industrial ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Scientific Americans: Invention, Technology, and National Identity by
Susan Branson (review)-
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Abstract: Susan Branson's Scientific Americans is a somewhat idiosyncratic cultural history of the United States that seeks to explain how science and technology became essential to American identity before the Civil War. She does this through a series of thematic chapters that examine the ways in which Americans symbolized certain scientific discoveries, inventions, and civic projects in popular scientific writings, fiction, music, poetry, lithographs, cartoons, public events, and memorabilia. This is a book that will be of greatest interest to general readers, who may, however, struggle to understand how American ideas about science and technology changed over time. Historians may be disappointed that Branson does not ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Northern Sparks: Innovation, Technology Policy, and the Arts in Canada
from Expo 67 to the Internet Age by Michael Century (review)-
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Abstract: Northern Sparks introduces an "alternative technological ethos" that developed in Canada over the last three decades of the twentieth century, when the mutually constitutive relationship of technology to culture was overtly acknowledged and purposely experimental. This distinctly Canadian alternative occupied productive borders between art and industry, emphasized embodied interaction with technology, and exemplified an improvisatory approach to social structures. The book is a challenge to technologically deterministic accounts of creative progress that characterize current debates about social media and artificial intelligence. Instead, like the narrator in a science fiction alternate history plot, author ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Environmental Turn in Postwar Sweden: A New History of Knowledge by
David Larsson Heidenblad (review)-
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Abstract: In 1995, Dutch political scientist Maarten Hajer published The Politics of Environmental Discourse. The book came at a time when new steering technologies were in fashion. Economic incentives, certification schemes, and technological innovation would provide eco-efficiency according to the Brundtland Commission gospel of sustainable development. While soon mainstreamed, much "ecological modernism" was also hype, hypocrisy, or just wishful thinking. Neither technology nor policy delivered as quickly as the eco-optimists of the neoliberal era hoped. In the current, very different, era of the Anthropocene, there seems to be a growing realization that technology alone cannot get humanity out of its environment/climate ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Valuing Clean Air: The EPA and the Economics of Environmental Protection
by Charles Halvorson (review)-
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Abstract: In Valuing Clean Air, Charles Halvorson brings an incisive eye to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to regulate air pollution from the 1970s to the 1990s. Halvorson carefully examines the interconnection of regulatory regimes, neoliberalism, and environmental advocacy in order to track the EPA's transition from a command model of regulation at its founding to an ostensibly more flexible, market-oriented approach by the late 1980s (one which of course continues today). Ultimately, Valuing Clean Air is a noteworthy institutional and intellectual history of the EPA that will interest environmental historians, historians of science and technology, and scholars of regulatory regimes more broadly.In ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move by
Vincanne Adams (review)-
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Abstract: In many ways, the North American landscape is one made and remade by agricultural chemicals. Pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, toxicants, and their variations have fundamentally changed what it means to farm, how to understand ecological relationships, and the health and well-being of soil, water, and the human body itself. Historians have tracked these poisons by following their agricultural, technological, cultural, and political contours, beginning with works on DDT (Thomas Dunlap, DDT, 1981); Rachel Carson and her 1962 book, Silent Spring (Linda Lear, Rachel Carson, 1997); and regional, agricultural applications (Pete Daniel, Toxic Drift, 2005). Newer books by Michelle Mart (Pesticides, A Love Story ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Age of the Soybean: An Environmental History of Soy During the Great
Acceleration ed. by Claiton Marcio da Silva and Claudio de Majo (review)-
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Abstract: The Age of the Soybean is a lively collection of essays about the political ecology of this ubiquitous (yet often completely invisible) global crop. In many ways, the book picks up where a previous indispensable volume, The World of Soy (Dubois et al., 2008), left off. While the earlier book was focused on the global history of soy as a food product, with a lighter approach to the political ecology of agriculture, the new volume promises to place the meteoric twentieth-century rise of soybean production in the context of the "great acceleration." However, only a handful of chapters are clearly focused on this goal. Instead, most of the authors build arguments about national agrarian histories or particular ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Justice and the Interstates: The Racist Truth about Urban Highways ed. by
Ryan Reft, Amanda Phillips de Lucas, and Rebecca Retzlaff (review)-
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Abstract: It's hard to imagine a more transformational technology than the Interstate Highway System, which remade American mobility, society, and cities. Often framed as a heroic achievement, the costs of highways to marginalized communities are becoming increasingly clear. In Justice and the Interstates, editors R. Reft, A. Phillips de Lucas, and R. Retzlaff ask, "How can a highway be racist'" Diverse contributors answer by looking beyond supposedly incidental harms by unwitting engineers to reveal the purposeful ways American highways—as a technocratic process and infrastructure—have been used as weapons against communities of color. The book, at once shocking and unsurprising, offers fresh and readable insights into the ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- The City Electric: Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Postcolonial Tanzania
by Michael Degani (review)-
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Abstract: For a long time, energy anthropologists have shied away from studying power and infrastructure dynamics in African cities. Their interest instead has been in understanding the impact of power infrastructure development and consumption in rural areas, using the traditional-modern dichotomous lens. Employing ethnographic methods, Michael Degani breaks this norm and takes his readers to neoliberal Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in the 1990s and 2000s, where there was an electric power crisis. He approaches the power system as a participant-observer of power distribution and consumption in the nonelite streets, "the poorer urban core neighborhoods" (p. 29). Degani invites STS scholars to examine resilience strategies ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Coming of the Railway: A New Global History, 1750–1850 by David
Gwyn (review)-
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Abstract: By 1850, national railway networks had emerged in Great Britain, across western Europe, and in the United States. Yet, as David Gwyn argues, the genesis of the railway revolution began much earlier. With impressive research and superb prose, Gwyn traces the complex evolution of railway technology, finance, and operating practices. In the process, he avoids technological determinism and Whiggish presentism, indicating that there was never one best way to run a railway, and that the proponents of unsuccessful methods should be given credit for their efforts. He also shows that political upheaval, international conflict, and changing perceptions of socioeconomic class did as much as inventors and entrepreneurs to ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters by
Thomas Zeller (review)-
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Abstract: Driving is a visual experience. Even today, despite astonishing technology, the only sense a driver must have is still the sense of sight. In Consuming Landscapes, Thomas Zeller examines driving as a constructed visual experience.In selecting a scenic route, drivers choose their vistas, but such views are also chosen for them, and often contrived for them, by the road designers. Setting aside the proverbial "Point A" and "Point B," which often pass as the only places that are supposed to matter in a trip, Zeller investigates the line segment between the two, reminding us that drivers' experiences are never limited to the roadway and the others on it. Drivers do not just drive through landscapes; they drive in ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric
Planning, and White Flight by Nicholas Dagen Bloom (review)-
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Abstract: Nicholas Dagen Bloom adds to the literature on the eclipse of mass transit in the United States by the motorcar. "Carmegeddon," this has been called in a book of the same name by Daniel Knowles (2023). Unlike Knowles, Bloom is not hateful of what cars have done to cities, though his "Auto-Centric" is a powerful expression borrowed from psychology. Nor does he subscribe to the noir fantasy involving corporate evildoers—General Motors the worst—that conspired to see to the abandonment of the railways that once were a commanding presence in urban America. He emphasizes that the alleged conspirators gained control of only a small proportion of urban transit systems but that virtually all other U.S. cities also ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation by
Jürgen P. Melzer (review)-
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Abstract: Ambitiously, Melzer explores Japan's aviation history (both civil and military) from 1877 to 1945—an era shaped by external wars that left their marks on the field's contexts and content. The result is the most comprehensive study in English to date on the subject, focusing particularly on the aircraft industry and its community. Those familiar with the history of Japanese aviation can appreciate the enormity of the author's undertaking. Vast scholarship, in English and even more so in Japanese, has often emphasized the successive stages of technology transfer within the aircraft industry, underscoring the French, British, and German influences on the shaping of Japanese aviation.Melzer does trace this overall ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Development of Nuclear Propulsion in the Royal Navy, 1946–1975 by
Gareth Michael Jones (review)-
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Abstract: A generation ago, George Mazuzan wrote in the pages of this journal that nuclear power was a subject much in need of further historical research, "a bonanza waiting to be mined" for analyzing the relationship between society and nuclear technology ("Nuclear Energy," January 1986). Since then, scholars have produced important work on the history of nuclear energy, although no book has explored systematically the development of British nuclear propulsion since the mid-1970s, when Margaret Gowing published a two-volume history of Britain's atomic programs through 1952 (Independence and Deterrence, 1974). Accordingly, Gareth Jones's book stands poised to be a welcome addition to the literature.Jones does not ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around
1900 by Viktoria Tkaczyk (review)-
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Abstract: This book's main point of departure is the emergence of the field of neuroscience in the second half of the nineteenth century, in particular the identification of the auditory cortex in the 1860s. Through detailed case studies concerned primarily with German- and French-speaking academia, Tkaczyk shows how this discovery stimulated the development of new theoretical and practical knowledge concerning sound and hearing in disciplines as diverse as psychoanalysis, linguistics, metaphysics, psychoacoustics, shock-wave physics, musicology, and phoniatrics.Tkaczyk is not simply writing the history of auditory neuroscience; instead, she shows that the preoccupation with phenomena such as auditory cognition, sonic ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Horn, or The Counterside of Media by Henning Schmidgen (review)
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Abstract: This is a rather extraordinary and original exploration of the role of tactility in the history of technologies of media, media theory, and media art. The bold thesis, stated early in the introduction, concerns a tactile agency of media technologies where, instead of the passive swiping, prodding, and gesturing on smooth glass touchscreens that seem to characterize user interactions with digital devices in everyday life, media technologies have long been scanning, probing, poking, or touching us. This is the counterside of media, argues Schmidgen, who calls for a more "symmetrical theory of the tactile" (p. 4). The true import of this is scarily prescient, but the steps along the way are carefully placed. One of ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Cine-Mobility: Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea's Film and
Transportation by Han Sang Kim (review)-
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Abstract: The vital connections between cinema and transportation in modernity have been well established in film theory and film history, but Han Sang Kim's new volume provides a perspective that places crucial emphasis on the militaristic and policed nature of visual cultures in post/colonial regimes. In Cine-Mobility, Kim brings together the concepts of heteronomous, induced spectatorship (that is, a spectatorship that was constructed and forcibly policed under an expansionist regime) with the concept of gesture, as articulated by Brecht, Benjamin, and Agamben, in a productive exercise that creates space for the unpredictable potentialities of spectators, even in coercive or oppressive systems. In doing so, he offers ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Rare Merit: Women in Photography in Canada, 1840–1940 by Colleen
Skidmore (review)-
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Abstract: It was the summer of 1841 when the American daguerreotypist Mrs. Fletcher made history as the first woman to open a professional photography studio in either North America or Britain. Somewhat surprisingly, this groundbreaking moment happened in the small town of Pictou, Nova Scotia. In Rare Merit, Colleen Skidmore tracks the scant archival traces of Fletcher's peripatetic practice to Quebec City, Montreal, and Charleston, South Carolina, before Fletcher vanishes from the historical record. Fletcher's story opens Rare Merit and skillfully articulates Skidmore's main thesis: women's histories are central to the medium, and women played a significant role in the development of Canadian photography. It also ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt by Andrew Simon
(review)-
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Abstract: In Media of the Masses, Andrew Simon tells a compelling story of how audiocassettes transformed Egypt in the 1970s and '80s. By allowing a greater number of people not just to access audio content but also to produce and distribute it, cassettes were at the center of a new popular consumer culture. Simon tells this story through vivid vignettes that shine a light into the role of technology in everyday life.By following cassettes, the first two chapters take us through economic change and consumer culture in the years of Sadat and infitah (opening), which have seldom featured in historical accounts. Through the lens of ever–more available and widespread cassette players, Simon shows how liberalization, migration ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Under the Radar: Tracking Western Radio Listeners in the Soviet Union by
R. Eugene Parta (review)-
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Abstract: The last decade has seen a resurgence of disinformation campaigns, whose illusive architects adapt new technologies and social media platforms to influence policy decisions, public opinion, and even voting outcomes in Europe, the United States, and beyond. This has left many audiences questioning the veracity of what they encounter in broadcasts and digital media and has siloed listener and viewer opinions into self-reinforcing echo chambers. How do we present new facts and information to those audiences whose views, and indeed contexts, are radically different from our own' This is the question that lies at the center of R. Eugene Parta's Under the Radar, a timely account of the audience research operations of ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Race and Radio: Pioneering Black Broadcasters in New Orleans by Bala James
Baptiste, and: Black Radio/Black Resistance: The Life & Times of the
Tom Joyner Morning Show by Micaela di Leonardo (review)-
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Abstract: As we observe a retrieval of race record histories suppressed during legally imposed racial apartheid in the United States, we are also witnessing a burgeoning in Black radio research that excavates business models, culturally relevant program format strategies, race and class-based exploitative practices, and Black radio personalities as influencers, exemplified in recent publications by mass communications researcher Bala James Baptiste and anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo. In media and technology discourse, "race records" are albums geared toward an African American listenership, and "Black radio" refers to radio stations that air race records and offer Black-oriented programming spanning the continuum of ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age by Brian
Jefferson (review)-
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Abstract: A burgeoning literature has drawn attention to how racial discrimination shapes and is shaped by calculative and computational technologies, most notably in works by Ruha Benjamin, Charlton McIlwain, and Benjamin Higgins. Brian Jefferson's Digitize and Punish makes an important contribution to this growing field by examining the intersection of race and computing in an understudied historical case: the development and growth of computerization in the U.S. criminal justice system beginning in the 1960s. In doing so, Jefferson problematizes theorizations of digitized social control that claim that information technologies upend modernity's social categories and disciplinary strategies, drawing attention instead to ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Prison House of the Circuit: Politics of Control from Analog to
Digital by Jeremy Packer et al. (review)-
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Abstract: This book begins with four circuits—and four chairs. First is the electric chair, with the human subject "the final element" in this "semi-automated electronic kill chain" (p. 1). The second is an "image-oriented behavior modification apparatus," with electrical shocks designed to cure its subject's imagined "sexual deviance" (p. 2). Next the command chair of a drone, and finally the vestigial driver's seat of an autopiloting automobile embarking on what will prove to be an ill-fated journey. In each anecdote, the connection of circuit to chair is, The Prison House of the Circuit reminds us, a connection to the human. In the 1983 film War Games, replacing men in missile silos meant removing the symbols of their ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Prophets of Computing: Visions of Society Transformed by Computing ed. by
Dick van Lente (review)-
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Abstract: This book is a collection of fourteen chapters that discuss how societies in thirteen countries anticipated and thought of the role of computing since the end of World War II. The authors demonstrate that there was wide discussion about the future of computers and their effects on countries around the world. This collection of studies presents a rich and new body of evidence for these local views that adds to a growing historiography on computing. For English-speaking scholars in particular, a wealth of new Asian and Central European sources on the discussion of computing makes this a rich resource. The contributors concentrate largely on presenting the views of computer scientists and other technologists, social ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet by Ted Striphas (review)
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Abstract: The term "algorithm," once fairly esoteric, has become the centerpiece of an extensive, politically charged discourse about the computerization of media. Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet finds continuity between this discourse and patterns of contestation that go back centuries. The tensions that presently attend algorithms in search engines and social media, Striphas suggests, have been around since the word "culture" was coined.Although its title orients it toward the past, Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet is not exactly a work of history. The introduction situates the book in the tradition of Raymond Williams's keywords project, which sought to analyze words that have become socially charged. ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Code: From Information Theory to French Theory by Bernard D. Geoghegan
(review)-
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Abstract: Geoghegan's book attempts to show how the postwar momentum of communication studies in the social sciences and humanities was indebted to an older political agenda of the big American philanthropic foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, Macy), with the pivot of the nascent fields of information theory, cybernetics, and computer science as technocratic soft-power tools.This project is quite similar in theme and scope to Lafontaine's tracking of the roots of "French theory" in these fields to the American military-industrial complex (L'Empire cybernétique, 2004). But Geoghegan brings more historical substance with valuable archive material from the Rockefeller foundation, as well as an extensive secondary literature to ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- Hot Tubs and Pac-Man: Gender and the Early Video Game Industry in the
United States (1950s–1980s) by Anne Ladyem McDivitt (review)-
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Abstract: In Hot Tubs and Pac-Man, Anne Ladyem McDivitt delves into the roles women played in the nascent video game industry's workforce and how assumptions about women's interest in and relationship to computer technologies became embedded in gaming. The book is a deeply thoughtful monograph that adds much-needed nuance and historical grounding to the study of gender and video gaming.The chapter titles are drawn from primary sources that illuminate how women attempted to maneuver through the masculine, frat-house atmosphere common at many major video game companies. The author positions the book alongside other historical works, such as Michael Newman's Atari Age (2018), my own work on the U.S. coin-operated video game ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Doctor Who Wasn't There: Technology, History, and the Limits of
Telehealth by Jeremy A. Greene (review)-
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Abstract: The question of how medicine is practiced safely and effectively at a distance, and the role of technology in mediating this, has come into renewed focus in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as Jeremy A. Greene argues in this wonderful book, it is not just that there is a far longer legacy of telemedicine than one might suppose but that uncovering such a history has important consequences for how we think about the exclusionary nature of multiple forms of technology that became intimately bound up with medical practice.Greene draws instructive and nuanced comparisons between the promises and realities of multiple forms of technology in relation to medical practice, focusing particularly on the telephone ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-04T00:00:00-05:00
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