Technology and Culture最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Collective Wisdom: Collecting in the Early Modern Academy ed. by Anna Marie Roos and Vera Keller
• Aurélien Ruellet (bio)

In January 1742, a mummified ibis was presented at a meeting of the Egyptian Society in London, then carefully dissected a few days later. During another session, a mummy was opened by one of the members, Charles Pococke, who made hypotheses regarding the chemical components of the pigments used for coffins as well as the embalmment techniques. This is one of the numerous narratives that are scattered throughout the volume Collective Wisdom, edited by Anna Marie Roos and Vera Keller, the result of three conferences that brought together scholars from different countries and thematic horizons.

At the core of most of the eleven contributions, finely put in a wider historiographical perspective by the introduction, lays the question of the circulation of objects and the building of collections within the learned societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ingeniously referred to as “collective wisdom,” the focus of the book is on “the knowledge gained from studying collections . . . and the collections generated through objectbased study and exchange (archives, correspondence, journals)” (p. 16). The chapters are not about the birth of museums, but rather about the way collections, sometimes heterogeneous, composed of antiquities as much as of natural specimens, were circulated among equally heterogeneous social grounds, involving physicians, surgeons, quacks, merchants, and apothecaries, and how those objects were the support of an intellectual interest that was not confined to curiosity. The geographic focus is on central and northern Europe, with chapters devoted to the Leopoldina, which held its meetings in Halle; the Spalding Gentlemen Society in Lincolnshire (SGS); the multifarious activities of the collector and professor Ole Worm in Copenhagen; the uses of objects and collections in pedagogic activities inspired by Comenius; or learned circles in the commercial cities of Frankfurt/Main and Dantzig.

The historian of technology will find many points of interest: besides the discussions of technical objects (like the “roman lamp”—actually a medieval Jewish lamp used for Sabbath—that Hans Sloane offered to the Society of Antiquaries) or technical processes (see for example the chapter by C. Grell on the metrological works of Burratini in Egypt), the contributions shed light on a series of technologies of knowledge management in those learned societies. The reader can appreciate, thanks to many illustrations in color, extracts from the minute book of the SGS: its entries, pointing at the presence of an object during a session, also gave

Reviewed by:

• Microhistories of Technology: Making the World by Mikael Hård
• Corinna R. Unger (bio)

In the preface to his new book, Mikael Hård describes how his approach to the history of technology has evolved over the decades. He started out with a conviction that nineteenth- and twentieth-century history could be captured by terms like industrialization and mechanization. Later, though, he came to argue that those concepts were too abstract to do justice to the complexity of history. He then became interested in the notion of globalization but questioned its macroperspective, which tended to hide particularities from historical view. His new book documents in impressive ways how the history of technology has evolved as a field, and it shows the exciting avenues open to historians of technology today.

In his book on microhistories of technology, Hård demonstrates the richness of technologies that individuals and communities across the world have used and, in part, continue to use in their everyday lives. His understanding of technology is notably broad and informed by methods borrowed from microhistory, social history, cultural history, and gender history. The volume, which covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contains chapters on carpentry and construction work, communication via drums, sugar production, electricity networks, housing, cooking, beer brewing, and menstruation pads. In terms of geographic range, the chapters cover today’s Indonesia, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Ghana, northern India, Tanzania, Argentina, Kenya, Uzbekistan, and South Korea. Referring to nation-states is somewhat misleading, though, as Hård is less interested in national structures than in local and regional phenomena. By drawing on historical cases, he highlights the variety of technological knowledge related to all aspects of life.

For example, by using European travel accounts and ethnographic studies from the nineteenth century and complementing them with contemporary literature, Hård emphasizes how well adapted the so-called Indigenous building techniques in Indonesia and sugar production techniques in India were to local climatic and economic conditions. Furthermore, he underlines that [End Page 994] Europeans acknowledged and admired local practices and incorporated them into their own work, just as representatives of local communities were eager to learn about practices Europeans brought with them. Hård thereby shows how an in-depth analysis of a specific technology in situ can allow historians to speak to broader questions about the nature of colonial relations.

Hård does not question the fact that colonial relations were unequal and exploitative, or that they were anchored in racist and

Reviewed by:

• Moving Crops and the Scales of History by Francesca Bray et al
• Harro Maat (bio)

Four renowned historians of technology have delivered a wonderful and inspiring collection of crop histories. The book is important for more than just that. While the heart of Moving Crops is historic, stringing together a wealth of cases from different parts of the world, its central purpose is conceptual and historiographic: to demonstrate that much of the existing global history of crops, materials, and technology more generally is distorted.

Indeed, crops are the central topic to present a new approach to material artifacts and commodities that, as the authors put it, are the stuff of rooted global history. The choice for crops is for a purpose. Inspired by the French Annales school historians focusing on landscapes, the authors present the cropscape as the leading concept.

The methodological depth of the cropscape is convincingly explained, which is not to suggest the reader has to plow through abstract elaborations. A major reason the book is such a great read is the way critique, method, and principles are grafted onto concrete cases, presented as “riffs,” underlining the lively and entertaining style by which the crop stories are told. The introduction chapter needs only a handful of pages to set the stage for the first of these stories, portraying the centrality of crops in the transformation of the Cuban landscape and society through the works of two Cuban writers.

At this point the authors add an important critique. Most histories involving Cuba and crops almost inevitably give prominence to Sidney Mintz. He’s not called on stage for the opening riff, where Cuban writers perform with equal verve. This is a returning pattern in the book and brings less familiar authors and unexpected twists to the crop stories. Blended with renowned Western scholars—Mintz is sampled at various other points—the aim is to be global in the use of sources.

Neither crops nor historical periodization structure the book. The first chapter, “Times,” opens with a riff on date palms that dismisses straightforward historical chronology in clear terms. The movements of date trees, in both ancient Arab and recent American settings, defy a progressive historical narrative. Other riffs, on tobacco, rice, and cocoa, illuminate the intricate connections between crops and surrounding social-material structures in terms of seasonality, growth duration, and maturation. A final riff on millets connects history to current and future projections.

In chapters 2 and 3, the playful yet profound comments on analytical categories target understandings of “Places” and “Sizes

Reviewed by:

• Modernity at the Movies: Cinema-Going in Buenos Aires and Santiago, 1915–1945 by Camila Gatica Mizala
• Cecilia Maas (bio)

Modernity at the Movies sheds light on a largely unexplored facet of film history: the intricacies of exhibition and audience reception. The book addresses key questions: How did early film audiences perceive the advent of this technology? How did they experience going to the cinema in the early days? How did companies build their businesses around the exhibition of movies? How did the government and civil society actors react to the content of the films? Camila Gatica Mizala skillfully reconstructs the social customs surrounding cinema-going and the interaction of early audiences with the burgeoning technology of cinema. She compellingly argues that for the inhabitants of Buenos Aires and Santiago, the act of going to the cinema was a tangible expression of modernity in their everyday lives.

The book commences with an intriguing paradox: in the early twentieth century, cinema represented both a symbol of modernity and an escape from it. Films were a beacon of the latest technical advancements and embodied modern values like universalism and cosmopolitanism. Yet, as the opening quotation poignantly observes, cinema also offered respite from the “material and moral agitation of this terrible epilepsy that is called modern life.” This dichotomy positions cinema as an ideal lens through which to explore the experience of modernity in Latin American urban settings.

Mizala engages with a wide range of scholarly literature to define modernity. She intersects perspectives that highlight the subjective and experiential dimensions of modernity, as seen in the works of Marshall Berman, Reinhardt Koselleck, and Juan Sebastián Ospina León, with those viewing it as an elusive aspiration, as articulated by Nicola Miller. The book insightfully employs the notion of “multiple modernities” (S. N. Eisenstadt) and probes the question of where Latin America experienced modernity (Sarah Radcliffe), thereby crafting a nuanced definition that encompasses both technological evolution and emerging lifestyles in the context of a peripheral metropolis.

Over the course of five meticulously researched chapters, Mizala reconstructs various facets of cinema-going in Buenos Aires and Santiago. She examines the architecture, design, and equipment of cinema theaters; the pricing strategies and commercial tactics that transformed film into a mass entertainment medium; the state’s efforts to regulate film through censorship and its impact on the moral compass of viewers; the social practices and the explicit and implicit behavioral norms wi

Reviewed by:

• Franklin Ford Collection ed. by Dominique Trudel and Juliette De Maeyer
• Will Mari (bio)

In this unique assembly of the key writings of American poly-math and philosopher Franklin Ford (1849–1918), Dominique Trudel (Audencia Business School) and Juliette De Maeyer (University of Montreal) have provided scholars with an invaluable resource. Namely, they have curated and placed into critical context, via an open-access publisher, Ford’s most important, surviving work on communication technology, as expressed via journalism, markets, transportation, and government. Furthermore, this work is from a formative moment in the creation of the modern field of sociology—specifically, media sociology—and the broader study of technology itself.

Ford was a brilliant, if eccentric and mysterious, figure—with part of the mystery enhanced by the loss of many of his personal papers and [End Page 1024] correspondence in a fire at Columbia University in October 1914 (pp. viii, xxviii). Best known for his ill-fated Thought News project with John Dewey at the University of Michigan in the early 1890s, Ford’s contributions to the development of pragmatist philosophy and, perhaps more indirectly, the Chicago School tradition (associated with one of his friends, Robert Park) are less well known. Scholars as varied as Daniel J. Czitrom, James Carey, and Norman Sims, along with Andrej Pinter, John Durham Peters, Jeff Pooley, and Zena Beth McGlashan, have worked to reconnect Ford to his contemporaries.

While Ford had a falling out with Dewey, the former influenced the latter’s ideas, especially the central concept of scientific inquiry. Trudel and De Maeyer review the relevant historiography surrounding Ford, and introduce the primary texts themselves, in an introduction that builds on their previous research into this enigmatic figure. They then discuss the three main themes of Ford’s often intellectually itinerant life (ranging from Detroit to New York City and everywhere in between), including “the specific problems of the press and the many remedies he envisioned . . . the interconnected flows of money, transportation, and communication central to modern industrial societies . . . and the political and social theory that lay behind Ford’s projects” (p. ix). Ford was interested in ideas that still impact our information economy, including how to sustain journalism and how technology could help markets govern themselves.

Of interest to historians of technology is how Ford conceived of “electric communication” in the form of early telephone and telegraph networks, as well as transportation systems (pp. 195, 236). Ford was fascinated with such tools and how they promised to reinvigor

Reviewed by:

• Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism ed. by Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons and Julie McCormick Weng
• Hamid Farahmandian (bio)

The common misunderstanding regarding the depth of interest that Irish writers had in science and technology has arisen due to the dominant influence of certain iconic figures, such as W. B. Yeats. Yeats’s powerful and evocative imagery depicting scenes of the “sally gardens” and old Irish heroes has overshadowed the broader and more nuanced engagement of Irish writers with scientific and technological themes during the Literary and Cultural Revivals. The focus on traditional and cultural elements in works like Yeats’s has led to an underestimation of the multifaceted exploration of science and technology within the broader landscape of Irish modernist literature. In Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism, editors Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng challenge this commonly held belief by exploring the relationship between Irish modernism and emerging sciences and technologies in the early twentieth century.

The first part of the book explores how Irish Revivalists like J. M. Synge, Seumas O’Sullivan, and Emily Lawless aimed to reconcile religious and scientific experiences, suggesting reenchantment through scientific observation. It also discusses John Eglinton’s role in advocating for cosmopolitanism and modernity during the Irish Literary Revival. Transitioning to the 1916 Easter Rising, this part examines the impact of everyday life, cinema, and media technologies, emphasizing tableau vivant, montage, and film in shaping contemporary representations.

The second part examines Tom Greer’s technological concepts, like mechanical wings and print media, and their influence on James Joyce, with a particular focus on the protagonist of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, emphasizing their shared concern for the effects of scientific discourse on human interaction. It then shifts to Yeats, exploring his avant-garde use of theater technology, particularly scenography, as a deliberate break from conventional realism and English cultural materialism. A chapter on Elizabeth Bowen concludes this part by challenging the tech-tradition dichotomy, portraying gadget interactions and entrepreneurial pursuits in the travel industry as integral to her characters’ morality.

Part 3 investigates the impact of gramophones and radio on Lennox Robinson’s play Portrait (1925), serving as a metaphor for postindependence Ireland’s psychological strain. This part shifts to Joyce, exploring his adaptation to the evolving media landscape through gramophone recordings and the challenges faced during

Reviewed by:

• The Philosopher of Palo Alto: Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC, and the Original Internet of Things by John Tinnell
• Andreas Hepp (bio)

Historical research has provided an important understanding of how and in which social and cultural contexts today’s digital media and their infrastructures have emerged. Two definitive contributions are Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyber-culture (2006), which centers on the Whole Earth Network, and Patrick McCray’s The Visioneers (2013), which explores space colonies and nanotechnologies in close relation to the developmental contexts of the digital era. Both studies incorporate personal approaches along with a broader social and cultural contextualization. The Philosopher of Palo Alto by John Tinnell follows a similar approach, concentrating on Mark Weiser (1952–99), a computer scientist and chief technology officer at Xerox PARC. However, the publication is not merely a biography; as the subtitle suggests, it aims to capture the emergence of what we now refer to as the “internet of things,” with reference to Weiser. The investigation is based on Weiser’s files in the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University, his publications, his interviews with former colleagues, and their publications.

The structure of The Philosopher of Palo Alto travels along ten chapters in chronological order. Following an introduction, the book begins with a contextualizing chapter on Xerox PARC. This section includes more biographical details, describing Weiser and his arrival in Palo Alto. The narrative then shifts to a more contemplative perspective, delving into Weiser’s interest in a philosophical approach to “things,” specifically through the influence of Michael Polanyi and Martin Heidegger. The extent to which Weiser’s technological thinking is influenced by phenomenology and the philosophy of life is a recurring theme throughout the book. It becomes clear that Weiser had significantly different ideas about the internet of things than the MIT [End Page 1046] Media Lab headed by Nicholas Negroponte, to which he positioned himself in opposition. However, it also becomes apparent to what extent Weiser’s approach to ubiquitous computing (“ubicomp”) was shaped through his debates and confrontations with colleagues, particularly with Lucy Such-man, who also worked at Xerox PARC. For Weiser, ubicomp did not mean transforming the human environment into a smart assistant—Negroponte’s “talking butler”—but rather, an “entanglement” of computer technology with the “natural” tangible environment of humans in which computer technology fades into the background. Tinnell’s study illustrates the hor

Reviewed by:

• Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700–1830 by Matthew Daniel Eddy
• Manon C. Williams (bio)

In Media and the Mind, Matthew Daniel Eddy provides an insightful and thorough exploration of student notebooks from Enlightenment Scotland, arguing that these notebooks operated as “paper machines” that facilitated cognitive processing and knowledge management. The study is based on extensive archival material collected from university, school, library, and family archives across Scotland. Eddy structures his argument around John Locke’s metaphor of the tabula rasa, the mind as a blank page, through which Eddy expands on this misinterpreted conceptualization of Enlightenment learning. Drawing on theories from disciplines as varied as anthropology, material culture, and cognitive science, he convincingly demonstrates that the notekeepers and their notekeeping practices are just as important to investigate as the contents on the page.

This study is extremely detailed and quite lengthy, containing interwoven arguments too numerous to expand upon here. It would appeal to historians of science and the Enlightenment, historians of education and childhood, and scholars of material culture and media. The book is divided into three parts, each encompassing a different educational phase: primary schools, academies, and universities. Within each part, the chapters cover a different skill that students learned and engaged with to illustrate a dynamic learning process. A particular strength of the book is how Eddy situates these students within the broader social, intellectual, and cultural processes of the eighteenth century, contributing to our understanding of the popular Enlightenment. His exploration of the often-neglected topic of childhood education and literacy is especially interesting (ch. 2), as is his analysis of the commodification of intellectual rights with regards to the circulation of university lectures in student notebooks (ch. 10).

Historians of technology will be especially interested in Eddy’s discussion of these notebooks as “paper machines,” a term drawn from media historian Markus Krajewski’s study of library index cards (Paper Machines, 2011). Eddy distinguishes student notebooks from a robust scholarship of “paper technologies,” employed by early modern cultural historians to describe the epistemic functions of paper records as material objects to organize and manage information. Summarizing Krajewski, Eddy writes: “As a material artifact, a ‘paper machine’ is a technology that consists of different paper components—slips, sheets, scraps—that are both crafted and set in motion by the human hand” (p. 6)

Reviewed by:

• Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State by Roland Jackson
• Edward J. Gillin (bio)

For anyone interested in the history of scientific advice and government, the past three or four years have delivered an endless stream of gobbets, thanks in large part to the eloquence of the United Kingdom’s political elites. In July 2020, while planning the reopening of the British economy following its first COVID-19 lockdown, the then chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, was reported to have identified the real challenge to be “about handling the scientists, not handling the virus.” [End Page 1022] It later came out that the government’s chief scientific adviser referred to Sunak as “Dr Death, the chancellor.” The recent public inquiry into the U.K. government’s handling of the COVID crisis has revealed a huge lack of cohesion between policymakers and scientific advisers, characterized by mistrust, lack of understanding, and a culture of blame. With this in mind, Roland Jackson’s Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State is timely.

As Jackson observes, nineteenth-century Britain represented a significant time and place for the formation of state-science relations, both in terms of the legislative and the executive. What follows is a broad overview of the various subjects and challenges on which nineteenth-century scientific specialists sought to influence public policy. Such a wide-ranging overview is long overdue: as the earliest nation to industrialize and mobilize fossil fuels toward economic expansion, the role of technical knowledge in the nineteenth-century British state resonates with many of the challenges facing twenty-first-century societies around the world. This is made particularly apparent by Jackson’s canny division of the areas in which the British state was most concerned between 1815 and 1900, namely the armed forces (pt. 2), the management of food resources (pt. 3), the regulation of transport and infrastructure (pt. 4), industry (pt. 5), public health and social policy (pt. 6), and revenue and standards (pt. 7). Chapter 12, “Infection and Disease,” will be especially relevant to readers, given its focus on the management of cholera epidemics and the historic tensions between politicians and advisers over quarantine periods and economic recovery. Chapter 6, on fisheries, seems equally relevant if somewhat depressing in its familiarity to contemporary discussions over sustainability in this industry: it seems that the British state has never successfully organized its fishing sector.

The extensive nature of this study inevitably means that there are a few omissions, which, while not undermining the volume’s

Reviewed by:

• How Computers Entered the Classroom, 1960–2000: Historical Perspectives ed. by Carmen Flury and Michael Geiss
• Stephen Petrina (bio)

Exactly how did computers enter classrooms across the world in the 1960s through the 1990s? Were the practices and processes of this innovation similar from school to school or country to country? How Computers Entered the Classroom, 1960–2000 is a welcome addition to the historiography of educational media and technology. Across the introduction and nine cases/chapters is a consistent, focused engagement with the historical problem of computational innovation in schools and classrooms. Despite the cultural and linguistic differences from case to case—France, Hungary, Latvia, Sweden, West Germany, Switzerland, UNESCO, the European Community (EC), and the OECD—the book achieves a remarkable consistency.

In the introduction, Flury and Geiss provide a comprehensive historiography of computational innovation in the schools of eastern and western Europe. In the first case, Cardon-Quint documents France’s Le Plan [End Page 1044] Informatique pour tous, rolled out from 1984–88. Historians are hard-pressed to find another centralized case of this rapidity, scale, and scope in the early to mid-1980s. In the second case, Somogyvári, Szabó, and Képes document the decentralized, extracurricular, hands-on agency of students and teachers in Hungary, primarily through cybernetics clubs in Budapest during the 1960s and 1970s. Kestere and Purina-Bieza’s case of Latvia in the third chapter demonstrates parallels with Hungary with a focus on the 1980s and 1990s. Uniquely, the authors employ a nice integration of oral histories and primary records to explore efforts such as grassroots learning “on the basis of friendship.” In the fourth chapter, Cantarell explores how government officials in Sweden during the 1980s and 1990s relied on teachers to take the lead in computational innovation. Cantarell details the give-and-take of the Datorn i skolan and subsequent government-funded computers in schools initiatives from 1973 through the early 1980s. Similarly in the fifth case, Flury contextualizes the to-and-fro among the West German government, private sector vendors, and public school educators necessary to innovation in the 1980s. From March 1984 through 1988, the Computer + Bildung (Computers and Education) support association was an “intermediary actor” (p. 125). Geiss prefaces the sixth case with an observation that “due to the decentralized political structure of Switzerland, there are various historical pathways of computer education” (p. 148). Through a diverse range of actors and initiati