Lisa Gitelman, Geoffrey B. Pingree (eds.): New Media, 1740-1915 (2003)

Reminding us that all media were once new, this book challenges the notion that to study new media is to study exclusively today’s new media. Examining a variety of media in their historic contexts, it explores those moments of transition when new media were not yet fully defined and their significance was still in flux. Examples range from familiar devices such as the telephone and phonograph to unfamiliar curiosities such as the physiognotrace and the zograscope. Moving beyond the story of technological innovation, the book considers emergent media as sites of ongoing cultural exchange. It considers how habits and structures of communication can frame a collective sense of public and private and how they inform our apprehensions of the “real.” By recovering different (and past) senses of media in transition, New Media, 1740-1915 promises to deepen our historical understanding of all media and thus to sharpen our critical awareness of how they acquire their meaning and power.

Contributors:
Wendy Bellion, Erin C. Blake, Patricia Crain, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Lisa Gitelman, Geoffrey B. Pingree, Gregory Radick, Laura Burd Schiavo, Katherine Stubbs, Diane Zimmerman Umble, Paul Young.

Publisher MIT Press, 2003
Media in Transition series
ISBN 0262072459, 9780262072458
271 pages

publisher
google books

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Pasi Väliaho: Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema Circa 1900 (2010)

“In Mapping the Moving Image, Pasi Väliaho offers a compelling study of how the medium of film came to shape our experience and thinking of the world and ourselves. By locating the moving image in new ways of seeing and saying as manifest in the arts, science and philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century, the book redefines the cinema as one of the most important anthropological processes of modernity. Moving beyond the typical understanding of cinema based on optical and linguistic models, Mapping the Moving Image takes the notion of rhythm as its cue in conceptualizing the medium’s morphogenetic potentialities to generate affectivity, behaviour, and logics of sense. It provides a clear picture of how the forms of early film, while mobilizing bodily gestures and demanding intimate, affective engagement from the viewer, emerged in relation to bio-political investments in the body. The book also charts from a fresh perspective how the new gestural dynamics and visuality of the moving image fed into our thinking of time, memory and the unconscious.”

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2010
Film Culture in Transition series
ISBN 9089641408, 9789089641403
256 pages

Publisher

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Kooijman, Pisters, Strauven (eds.): Mind the Screen: Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser (2009)

“Mind the Screen pays tribute to Thomas Elsaesser, a pioneering and leading scholar in the field of film and media studies. The contributions present a close-up of media concepts developed by Elsaesser, providing a mirror for all types of audiovisual screens, from archaeological pre-cinematic screens to the silver screen, from the TV set to the video installation and the digital e-screen, and from the city screen to the mobile phone display. The book is divided into three ‘Acts’: Melodrama, Memory, Mind Game; Europe-Hollywood-Europe; and Archaeology, Avant-Garde, Archive.”

Edited by Jaap Kooijman, Patricia Pisters, and Wanda Strauven
Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2009
ISBN 9089640258, 9789089640253
374 pages

Publisher
OAPEN

PDF (8 MB, updated on 2011-1-2)