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The first optomechanical planetarium was opened in 1925 as part of the Department of Astronomy in the new building of the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The projection method for a dome-shaped screen had been developed in the previous years by the Carl Zeiss company in Jena together with Dyckerhoff & Widmann AG, which specialized in shell constructions made of reinforced concrete. Today, the classic projectors in planetariums around the world have been mostly replaced by digital fulldome systems. Since then, there has been a renewed historical interest in this approximately hundred-year-old technical invention; examples include research by Charlotte Bigg and Katherine Boyce-Jacino. In these works, it is above all the aspects of the spectacular that attract interest. In her dissertation project, now available as a book, Helen Ahner also examines the planetarium as a place of popular science education and entertainment.
In contrast to earlier studies that address the history of astronomical instruments between antiquity and the industrial age, investigate the sophisticated construction solution of the Zeiss engineers, or locate the planetarium in the history of modern knowledge, including the practices of art, architecture, and scientific simulation, Helen Ahner’s approach succeeds in capturing the surprise and amazement of contemporaries at this artificial experience of nature in the center of the modern city. By treating the planetarium as the “leading fossil of an archaeology of the experience of technology in the 1920s” (p. 185), Ahner thus takes up the ethnographic approach in science and technology studies founded by Stefan Beck in the 1990s.
One of the book’s particular strengths lies in the way the author develops her own arguments in constant exchange with a wide-ranging specialist discussion. Important points of reference, alongside social science theories of practice and embodiment, include Ute Frevert’s history of emotions and the concept of “technology emotions” recently outlined by Martina Heßler. At the beginning, however, Ahner makes the simple empirical observation that the planetarium and the perceptual situation created by it was repeatedly associated with the topos of the “miracle” in the public sphere (for example, in the much-used phrase “the miracle of Jena”). At the same time, the attitude of “wonder” was an indispensable driving force behind the communication of knowledge in these places. For Ahner, the entire physical texture of the audience experien
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In The Dangerous Art of Text Mining, historian Jo Guldi explores the application of text mining in historical research. Text mining, a method for quantitatively analyzing digitized text, is utilized by Guldi to examine British parliamentary records. The approach is portrayed as a dual-edged sword, embodying both art and hazard. Guldi characterizes text mining as an art that demands specialized expertise and flexible methodologies, aligning with historians’ heuristic and hermeneutic techniques. At the same time, she warns of its dangers, such as the potential for algorithms to foster overgeneralizations, amplify biases in data, and yield conclusions that overlook historical complexities and the nuanced interpretations of past actors. Despite the book’s ostensibly alarming title, Guldi’s critique of text mining is constructive, underscoring its capacity to enhance historical research if used with discernment, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of technological solutionism that mar some big data and early digital humanities projects.
The book is structured into three main sections. The first, “Towards a Smarter Data Science,” outlines Guldi’s methodological approach, advocating for a seamless integration of data science with historical research’s nuanced source criticism. The book adopts a somewhat antagonistic stance toward data science, portraying it as naive regarding data and algorithmic bias. [End Page 1033] Guldi posits that historians are uniquely positioned to prevent the uncritical application of algorithms to historical data. While data science studies often overlook such biases (as pointed out by R. Benjamin, Race after Technology, 2019; C. O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction, 2016), similar issues are evident in digital humanities and digital history. Think, for example, of the frequent use in digital history of topic modeling algorithms as exploratory tools without inspecting the degree of robustness of the models. Historians could also benefit from work in areas such as explainable AI, where initiatives are being advanced to augment the transparency of AI models, ensuring that users not only trust but also comprehend the underlying mechanisms and rationale of the algorithms employed in their research (for example, Molnar, Interpretable Machine Learning, 2022). Concurrently, information retrieval scholars have developed metrics to evaluate search strategy efficacy. Such metrics deserve more attention in Guldi’s book.
Guldi presents the strategy of critical search, which relies on the critical use of multiple algorithms
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Just in time to mark radio’s first century in many countries, Carolyn Birdsall’s Radiophilia is a particularly welcome and original addition to the scholarship of both radio studies and broadcasting history. This ambitious book introduces a new concept, “radiophilia,” understood as the attachment to or love for radio, and goes on to successfully unravel its various constitutive elements from the early days of the wireless to today, in multiple geographical contexts.
To undertake this task, the book often balances between overarching questions and concrete examples and is split into four chapters, simply named “Loving,” “Knowing,” “Saving,” and “Sharing.” This rather unusual approach of one-word progressive verbs as chapter titles is actually an excellent way for Birdsall to explicate her concept, as she can focus on what ties people (i.e., practices and emotions) to the medium over time. In the first pages, the attention is put on loving radio, both as action and practice, concerning individuals and groups. This is analyzed first in a historical manner, showing various forms of radiophilia over time, then through the lens of history of emotions, and finally in a multisensory and multimedia dimension. The book then moves on to the topic of knowing radio, shedding light on knowledge production as radiophilia. This chapter includes the communities formed around this technical hobby in the early days of radio, the importance of regulators and the industry, and the relationship between knowledge and affect, especially present with fan culture. In “Saving,” the author delves into the various shapes taken by radiophiliacs to preserve and hang on to the ephemeral sounds of the medium. Interestingly, this chapter includes amateur and professional actors as well as analogue and digital practices, revealing the width of the topic. The fourth chapter explores the issue of how enthusiasts have shared their love of radio over the last century. The net cast to catch the heterogeneity of this question is wide as individual, local, and national activities, practices, objects, spaces, and curatorial choices are all included. Overall, the author successfully balances an ambitious new and overarching concept with more concrete examples, and by doing so brings in a wide range of geographical and historical contexts, which makes the result particularly convincing. Interestingly, the author’s personal attachment to radio is also discussed on a few occasions in the book, which helps with understanding her perspective on the topic at hand and will likely echo many readers’ own relationship with radio. [End Page 1037]
In regard to the book’s contribution to the existing scholarship, a fe
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Today, Dallas is a major hub within the global aerospace network. But until 1940, aircraft design and production in the United States was concentrated on the two coasts. In this book, Terrance Furgerson shows how and why Dallas got its start in the aviation industry on the eve of World War II and how the showcase North American Aviation (NAA) plant, in turn, brought industrial-scale manufacturing into the heart of North Texas. Texas had long been a key region in the nation’s military activities, going back to the state’s incorporation into the United States in 1845. Early innovations in land- and sea-based aviation had been going on at military bases in San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and elsewhere across the state since the end of World War I, as Texas’s open spaces and favorable weather attracted aviation visionaries, pioneers, and enthusiasts.
The Dallas Story is a welcome addition to the thin extant historiography of the aviation and aerospace industry in Texas. Furgerson’s focus on the political-industrial story in Texas complements Barbara Ganson’s recent Texas Takes Wing (2014) and serves as an important bridge between older titles such as E. C. Barksdale’s The Genesis of the Aviation Industry in North Texas (1958) and Roger Bilstein and Jay Miller’s Aviation in Texas (1985), as well as the numerous studies of the Cold War and post–Cold War eras that invariably center on Texas’s key aerospace role within the broader military-industrial milieu.
NAA’s Dallas plant was up and running by the time the United States entered the war in December 1941, but the demands of wartime production rates, design iterations, and manufacturing expansion stressed the available skilled-labor pool. Further distractions came with an endless stream of official visitors to the Dallas plant for tours and the encouragement of the plant employees. Yet within a few short years, the NAA Dallas plant had produced thousands of AT-6 Texan trainers, B-24 Liberator bombers, and P-51 Mustang fighters for the war effort.
The book is aptly titled. This is truly a story of Dallas-based interests providing the driving force to bring a new industry into the area at a time before the nation’s military-industrial system was widespread, mature, and based out of Washington, D.C. At that time, Texas had a strong aviation culture that had materially contributed to the technical and operational innovations for air travel and mail delivery. Such prominent national Texans as Vice President John Nance Garner and Speaker of the
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In contemporary architectural practice, common methods for representing and analyzing airflow include computer-generated simulations and static two-dimensional diagrams. These techniques have limitations, particularly for architects engaged in the early stages of the design process. As architect Lisa Moffitt writes in Architecture’s Model Environments, previously understudied physical models from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries in Europe and North America may suggest alternative approaches to visualizing and designing with airflow in the present. These approaches are especially resonant at a time of changing climates, evolving relationships to airborne disease, and persisting environmental inequities.
Moffitt’s book is the most recent addition to UCL Press’s Design Research in Architecture series. Over the past decade, “design research” has become a catchall term for diverse approaches to incorporating multidisciplinary research methods into architectural design practice. In this contribution to the series, Moffitt presents a method of design research that combines historical case study analysis with construction, experimental testing, and exhibition of physical models. Moffitt argues that building and interacting with physical models can provoke new insights about historical episodes in the visualization of air. These historical precedents, in turn, inspire speculation about built environments at multiple scales in the present.
The book has four central chapters. It begins with a chapter on Moffitt’s own construction of “environmental models,” which she defines as “instruments which create controlled environments that make the phenomena of airflow visible in relation to an architectural model” (ch. 2). The subsequent three chapters present historical case studies of environmental models, each exploring resonances with Moffitt’s own experiments (chs. 3–5).
In chapter 2, Moffitt categorizes her environmental models into three types: wind tunnels, water tables, and filling boxes. These models, created as [End Page 1068] part of Moffitt’s dissertation research at the University of Edinburgh, draw on her experiences working as an architect in North America in the 2000s. Moffitt introduces a do-it-yourself approach to building each prototype. Extensive documentation of the design and construction process for each iteration provides readers with resources to replicate the prototypes using laser cutters, 3D printers, and traditional carpentry tools. Moffitt notes that such physical models make the diffuse, complex behavior of air more tangible and intuitive for designers by visualizing flows usi
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