The Shape of Experiment (2006)
Filed under proceedings | Tags: · art, art history, experiment, experimental art, history of science, history of technology, science, technology
What is the result of recent studies on the history of experiment? How has our image of science been changed since Ian Hacking’s statement, “experimentation has a life of its own,” turned into a catch phrase for investigations into the history of science? What is the lesson to be drawn from the studies following Steven Shapin’s and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985) and Peter Galison’s How Experiments End (1987)?
In trying to answer these questions, this conference did not aim at contributing to a more developed philosophy of scientific experimentation, nor did it try to return to the grand narratives on the history of science. Rather, the goal of this conference was to identify characteristic configurations within in the history of experimentalization from 1800 to the present. The guiding question was: what are the typical forms of experiment that emerged in the separated and shared history of science, technology, and the arts?
Conference: The Shape of Experiment, Berlin, 2-5 June 2005
Publisher Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
Preprint series, No. 318
235 pages
conference (prepared by Julia Kursell, Sven Dierig, and Henning Schmidgen)
publisher
Yongming Zhou: Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropology, china, history of technology, internet, politics, technology, telegraphy, web
It is widely recognized that internet technology has had a profound effect on political participation in China, but this new use of technology is not unprecedented in Chinese history. This is a pioneering work that systematically describes and analyzes the manner in which the Chinese used telegraphy during the late Qing, and the internet in the contemporary period, to participate in politics.
Drawing upon insights from the fields of anthropology, history, political science, and media studies, this book historicizes the internet in China and may change the direction of the emergent field of Chinese internet studies. In contrast to previous works, this book is unprecedented in its perspective, in the depth of information and understanding, in the conclusions it reaches, and in its methodology. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book is accessible to a broad audience.
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2006
Asian Studies / Political Science series
ISBN 0804751285, 9780804751285
304 pages
Thomas C. Jepsen: My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in Telegraph Office 1846-1950 (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · history of technology, labour, morse code, technology, telegraphy, women
The role of the telegraph operator in the mid-nineteenth century was like that of today’s software programmer/analyst, according to independent scholar Tom Jepsen, who notes that in the “cyberspace” of long ago, male operators were often surprised to learn that the “first-class man” on the other end of the wire was a woman.
Like the computer, the telegraph caused a technological revolution. The telegraph soon worked synergistically with the era’s other mass-scale technology, the railroad, to share facilities as well as provide communications to help trains run on time.
The strategic nature of the telegraph in the Civil War opened opportunities for women, but tension arose as men began to return from military service. However, women telegraphers did not affect male employment or wage levels. Women kept their jobs after the war with support from industry—Western Union in particular—and because they defended and justified their role.
“Although women were predominantly employed in lower-paying positions and in rural offices, women who persisted and made a career of the profession could work up to managerial or senior technical positions that, except for wage discrimination, were identical to those of their male counterparts,” writes Jepsen. “Telegraphy as an occupation became gendered, in the sense that we understand today, only after the introduction of the teletype and the creation of a separate role for women teletype operators.”
My Sisters Telegraphic is a fresh introduction to this pivotal communications technology and its unsung women workers, long neglected by labor and social historians.
Publisher Ohio University Press, 2000
ISBN 0821413449, 9780821413449
231 pages