New Media 1740-1915, edited by Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, MIT Press, 2004.
Zograscopes, Virtual Reality, adn the Mapping of Polite Society in Eighteenth Century England by Erin C. Blake
Page 1-3, zograscope viewer (one lens to create depth in a printed image) described.
Page 4, "virtual reality, a space that is enacted technologically and perceived by viewers but that exists nowhere on its own"
Page 5, role of zograscope image as a print
Page 11, "trade, politics, and industry, subjects that were inappropriately businesslike for polite conversation, were also inappropriate for virtual reality in the 1740s and 1750s.
Page 15, space as spacious is open and abstract. It carries the illusion of neutrality... place is particular, engages, even personified"
Page 21, "In theory, constructing knowledge of space by emptying places of previous associations, then filling the resulting empty space with new values, will create a new place. In practice, polite space would always exhibit a tension between abstract ideals and actual human impulses."
Heads of State: profiles and politics in Jeffersonian America by Wendy Bellion
Page 31, physiognotrace - a profile tracing device, 1802
Page 38-39, history of profile, esp 1st century Pliny the Elder and French bureaucrat Etienne de Silhouette.
Page 42, 1788 physionotrace
Page 44, inner sections of profile cuts all put into a barrel - 2 barrels full of "blockheads"
"All sitters equal in size and shape and colour - constituted democratic assembles in miniature"
Page 45, posing within device "entailed an implicit expression of consent"
Page 46, "Silhouettes were the product of spatial abuttal, proof of contact between a person and a representational system"
Page 51, "During the 1800s the Englishman Francis Galton, best known as the father of eugenics, ... replaced phsiognomy with another pseudoscience of the head, phrenology ... that gave rise to the mugshot, enabled 'profile' to attain an ominous legalistic meaning; "profiling""
Children of Media, Children as Media: optical telegraphs, Indian pupils, and Joseph Lancaster's system for cultural replication by Patricia Crain
Page 62, Lancaster described as a ready made American: "a figure of romanticism, a blowzy Byronic character, Profligate, spendthrift, overweight, paranoid, probably a sadist, possibly a pedophile, half altruist, half self-=promoting snake-oil salesman"
Page 64-65, "Panoptical visibility" school system illustrated. Very big brother/dystopian.
Page 66, "The Lancasterian student is not so much a surface to be written on as he is a surface upon which messages can be posted".
Page 71, "You're in the know if you find the abbreviation legible. In this way, the abbreviation embraces change"
Page 75, optical telegraph like the Pratchett clax
Page 77-78, Belief in Indian gestural language - eerie discussion.
Telegraphy's Corporeal Fictions by Katherine Stubbs
Page 92, Tom Standage casts the telegraph as "the Victorian internet"
Page 92-93, Telegraph fiction as genre
Page 96, "female operators could be hired at lower wages, they were also valued for their putative docility, their perceived willingness to be servants of the technology and the company".
Page 97, "Boomers who were famous both for their skillful work and for their irresponsible debauchery" (perceived image of pre-1870 telegraph operators)
From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision: physiological optics, commercial photography, and the popularization of the stereoscope by Laura Burd Schiavo
1850s stereoscopes were enclosed lenticular devices with Daguerreotypes. 3.5x7" standardized due to the size of Daguerreotypes.
Page 114, The medium of the stereoscopic viewer changed from scientific (1838) to entertainment (1860) without the form actually changing. How do we read this re-appropriation?
Page 116, "Stereoscope insinuated an arbitrary relationship between stimulus and sensation. This notion challenged centuries of thought that had assumed a direct correspondence between objects and their retinal projections."
Page 117, "Wheatstone ... developed theories that cast the body, rather than the world outside it, as an active producer of sensation"
Sinful Network or Divine Service: competing meanings of the telephone in Amish country by Diane Zimmerman Umble
Page 141, Opposite of boar cult.
Page 152, Essay on Amish political debate on the telephone. Conclusion that today, no phone in Amish houses which are "at the heart of Amish faith and life, in essence, sacred space"
rejecting contact with outside which are "unmediated by ... rituals of community life"
Souvenir Foils: on the status of print at the origin of recorded sound by Lisa Gitelman
Page 165, Phunnygraph - 3 people in box repeating what was said, pretending to be a phonograph recording.
Page 166, discussion of souvenirs.
R. L. Garner and the Rise of the Edison Phonograph in Evolutionary Philology by Gregory Radick
Page 178, phonics promoted as boon to efficient colonization - Garner has radical thought of using phonics for animals (heresy!)
Page 187, Book from 1892 on "speech of monkeys.
Page 192-193, analyze sounds by slowing down, re-recording, and reversing.
Page 196-197, Conway Lloyd Morgan denounces animal intelligence - impact through 20th century.
Scissorizing and Scrapbooks: nineteenth-century reading, remaking, and recirculating by Ellen Gruber Garvey
Page 208, Scrapbookers = gleaners, not violating copyright, just moving things around.
Page 219, "John Todd's Index Rerum of 1835 encouraged readers to create a personal catalog of their own reading"
Page 212, "Links in scrapbooks do not expire" (like web links do)
Page 213, exchange sections just ran other news stories without payment or permission. Early reposting - is this like Huffington post?
Media on Display: a telegraphic history of early American cinema by Paul Young
Page 230, "in The Lonesome Operator, the reunion of operator and engineer boyfriend in a single shot after several minutes of crosscut suspense implicitly links narrative resolution to heterosexual union".
"Teh telephones of early narrative cinema often acted as screens for shared doubts about the social benefits of new technologies that banished old barriers of space and time"
Page 233, experts want to keep masses ignorant. "Media spectacles offered a working understanding of these technologies to anyone who came to look and listen, and thus infringed upon the experts' source f authority, their (mystified) electrical knowledge."
Page 251, "I'd like to conclude by suggesting that we use telegraphic-cinematic discourse to help us rethink the transition to classical narrative form as a transition between variant definitions of realism that depend in part on telegraphy's own paradoxical position as both a spectacle in itself and a transmitter of distant messages or narratives"
Page 256, "To conjure up the telegraph as these films of the 1910s do was to allegorize film's newly refined language of visual storytelling and turn it, paradoxically, into an attraction."
