Technology and Culture最新文献

This essay demonstrates the value of postcards as visual evidence for historical research. Focusing on midcentury hotel and motel postcards, it offers a brief history of postcard production technologies and techniques and explores visual strategies they employed. While analyzing these images, the essay also considers how postcards deleted certain aspects of the scenes they depicted, rendering unpleasant objects invisible to the observer. Therefore, this essay argues that what is absent from the image is as significant as what is present.

This article explores the reliance of watermen (acquaroli) in early modern Venice on increasingly sophisticated waterwheels, designed, produced, and patented by competing inventors during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to load fresh water supplies that supplemented the rainwater on which the city otherwise depended for its freshwater needs. Using a range of archival and printed sources, this article examines the tools that delivered water to the watermen's barges and the state-sponsored competition this spurred among inventors. More broadly, the article investigates how Venice's patent process compared to those elsewhere in sixteenth-century Europe, with specific attention to the status of petitioners, contemporary notions of expertise, knowledge flows, and the role of the state.

This article introduces the importance of "raw materials activities" to foreground the overlooked material and labor dimensions of infrastructure. Through a case study of South Korea's Soyang Dam, it argues that following raw material activities provides a lens for understanding the broader social and environmental impacts of infrastructure. Raw material activities refer to the full range of human and technical labor involved in construction materials-including planning, extraction, transportation, processing, and even the erasure of material traces after use. In the case of the Soyang Dam, examining this labor illuminates competing visions of national development, economic interests, environmental commodification, and the dispossession of both humans and nonhumans in rural areas. Recognizing the materiality of raw materials is essential to fully grasp the often-overlooked infrastructural impacts on society and the environment.

This article engages with scholarship on sensory history, techno-science, and the political economy of taste, illustrating how flavor evaluation became an industrialized, professionalized practice through a case study of Stockholms bryggerier, a Swedish brewer. Through these shifts, the brewing industry redefined taste as a techno-scientific concern, reshaping professional roles and positioning sensory assessment as a critical site of negotiation between traditional craftsmanship and scientific authority in twentieth-century food industries. From the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, Stockholms bryggerier shifted from a "guild regime" of sensory judgment, led by traditionally trained brewmasters, to a "laboratory regime" grounded in techno-scientific methods. Central to this transformation was the difference test, which standardized flavor assessment amid political tensions between Sweden's temperance movement and the brewing industry over beer's alcohol content and sensory appeal. This article shows how the difference test transformed sensory practices into a politically and scientifically mediated process.

In the face of diverse and uneven environmental crises across the globe, ongoing efforts to "globalize" the history of technology field may be considered urgent. In doing so, however, we risk uncritically exporting the norms and practices of a predominantly Western-centric field-an arguably colonial act. This roundtable explores four areas of contention: how to conceptualize "the global"; why, how and with whom to study "history" amid threatened "futures"; how to articulate and delineate the field's subject matter ("technology"); and how researchers can collaborate equitably within and across diverse sites around the globe. Building on these discussions, we propose three themes for further conversation: how to transcend the North-South binary without disregarding its critical insights; how to balance the use of locally specific vocabularies with quasi-global terms; and how to develop collaborative relationships with those whose histories historians document, fostering joint experimentation with "historiographical interventions."

This article examines how construction machines have historically embodied and reinforced white masculine labor identities in North America. Focusing on operating engineers from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the article shows how these machines were symbolically cast as maternal, monstrous, or boyish, in ways that naturalized male dominance in skilled trades. Drawing on feminist technology studies and cultural analysis, the article demonstrates how human-machine relationships operated as gendered and racialized constructs in literature, propaganda, and labor publications. This article enriches histories of labor and technology by foregrounding how gender and power were co-constructed through machine imagery.

From a new materialist perspective, infrastructures are contingent and animated by agential forces, including the matter and objects from which they are constructed. They do not always behave as intended; instead, infrastructures-or parts of them-can become irritants. This article introduces the idea of "irritants" to highlight the disruptive and generative capacities of the material world. Through a case study of the Guri Dam in Venezuela during the 1960s, it examines how engineers responded to the jamming sluice gates that threatened the dam's stability. Drawing on Jane Bennett's notion of "thing-power," the article attributes agency to the gates themselves. Initially, engineers lacked a clear solution; and only after a prolonged process of experimentation and the introduction of new technical objects, such as custom-built grids, was the issue resolved. The article contributes to new materialist scholarship by exploring microhistorical approaches to materiality and emphasizing the agency of nonhuman entities in infrastructural history.