Technology and Culture最新文献

Frida Kahlo's artistic rendering of childbirth appears on the cover of this issue of Technology and Culture. This essay invites readers to view the history of medicine and technology through images, by tracing multi-sited genealogies of their visual cultures. The shifting representations of pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion can enrich historical research and teaching on twentieth-century reproductive biomedicine by foregrounding how images produce, circulate, and contest knowledge and power. Yet the different meanings attributed to the same image in different cultures and political regimes underscore that they cannot be fully understood without their historiography and their political work as visual artifacts.

This article reinterprets the early history of computer-aided design (CAD) by relocating its development from U.S. labs to transnational building sites in Saudi Arabia. Drawing on unpublished project records and planning documents, the article shows how American architectural firms working on Saudi-funded megaprojects shaped the routines, software, and visual language of CAD. By framing CAD as a product of geopolitical negotiation-rather than technical inevitability-this article unsettles dominant digital-turn narratives. This analysis contributes to architectural history, STS, and digital studies by demonstrating how design tools emerged through the entanglement of labor, software, and political ambition.

This essay explores computer profiling and surveillance systems developed by the hospitality industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Hotels and motels partnered with computer corporations and were among the first industries to create computer networks and management systems, using them for practical applications like reservations as well as to police guests and monitor hotel labor. However, there is no sustained history of the hospitality industry's role in computer research and design. Drawing on archival documents, trade journals, architectural literature, and hotel ephemera, this article shows how hospitality venues made computer profiling and surveillance seem welcoming, convenient, and user-friendly. The computer systems developed for hotels helped acclimate publics to the networked environments of contemporary everyday life, where digital devices and services ambiguously care for and surveil consumers, even in their own homes.

This article challenges the dominant focus on megaprojects in Chinese water management by uncovering a parallel history of small-scale, multifunctional water infrastructure in rural Jiangsu. Based on archival research and fieldwork, the article documents how local engineers, working beyond the gaze of the central state, embedded competing aesthetic and ideological visions-high modernism, revolutionary design, and vernacular innovation-into technical landscapes. This shift reframes water infrastructure not as a top-down imposition but as a product of localized creativity and negotiation. The article contributes to infrastructure studies and Chinese history by re-scaling development and decentering state narratives.

Runestaves are perpetual calendars that were made and used in Sweden and surrounding areas from the turn of the first millennium until printed almanacs superseded them in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. They represent a sophisticated form of vernacular science-tools that enabled lay users to calculate lunar cycles, feast days, and even Easter, independent of clerical authority. As such, runestaves exemplify locally maintained systems of empirical observation, symbolic notation, and collective knowledge transmission. Alongside the first extensive reconstruction of regional and temporal variation, this article draws on a new database of over 800 transcriptions to uncover the cognitive and cultural mechanisms that enabled this popular, extra-institutional perpetuation of calendrical science.

This article investigates how the development of the integrated circuit (IC) and the solderless breadboard reshaped the practices of electronics hobbyists during the 1960s and 1970s. As the IC became a black box that obscured its internal workings, hobbyists turned to periodicals and hands-on tools like the breadboard to navigate this shift. The breadboard fostered a "sketch-like" approach to electronic design, emphasizing creativity and iterative learning. By tracing these transformations, the article argues that this period fundamentally shaped contemporary understandings of innovation by highlighting the dynamic interplay between hands-on skill and emerging technologies.

This article investigates how twentieth-century U.S. corporations, nonprofit safety experts, and engineers came together to control the risks of home laundry equipment. Professionals worked with citizen-consumers in the U.S. to form a voluntary safety system intended to prevent injuries using education, markets for "safe" appliances, and consumer product testing. This system catered to informed middle-class families and relied on the principles of personal responsibility and free enterprise. Although home safety measures decreased fatal accidents, they disproportionately added to the workloads of contemporary homemakers and reinforced existing gender and class inequities. This article argues that these inequities set the stage for later government intervention, offering new insights into the intersections between consumer technology, domestic labor, and regulation. Resituating the history of safety from workplaces and transportation networks to the home, this article shows how injury prevention influenced how Americans shopped for and used potentially dangerous laundry machines.

This article examines how place-based dynamics reshape historical research, drawing on a retrospective analysis of a project on 2,200-year-old iron metallurgy in Arctic Sweden. Findings of advanced ironworking among ancient hunter-gatherers challenged dominant center-periphery narratives and exposed the influence of ongoing marginalization in Sweden's far north. The research was redirected by local histories, Indigenous and minority politics, and resource extraction legacies, particularly affecting the Sámi as well as other minorities. By tracing how place altered the research trajectory, the article highlights the entanglement of knowledge production with postcolonial struggles for recognition. It argues for the broader relevance of place in shaping historical inquiry across disciplines.