Hands on Media History: A new methodology in the humanities and social sciences

Description

Hands on Media History explores the whole range of hands on media history techniques for the first time, offering both practical guides and general perspectives. It covers both analogue and digital media; film, television, video, gaming, photography and recorded sound. Understanding media means understanding the technologies involved. The hands on history approach can open our minds to new perceptions of how media technologies work and how we work with them. Essays in this collection explore the difficult questions of reconstruction and historical memory, and the issues of equipment degradation and loss. Hands on Media History is concerned with both the professional and the amateur, the producers and the users, providing a new perspective on one of the modern era’s most urgent questions: what is the relationship between people and the technologies they use every day? Engaging and enlightening, this collection is a key reference for students and scholars of media studies, digital humanities, and for those interested in models of museum and research practice. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of figures Acknowledgments List of contributors Introduction: what is hands on media history? PART I Media histories 1 Why hands on history matters 2 Bringing the living back to life: what happens when we reenact the recent past? 3 A blind date with the past: transforming television documentary practice into a research method 4 (De)habituation histories: how to re-sensitize media historians 5 (Un)certain ghosts: rephotography and historical images PART II User communities 6 Photography against the Anthropocene: the anthotype as a call for action 7 On the performance of playback for dead media devices 8 The archaeology of the Walkman: audience perspectives and the roots of mobile media intimacy 9 Extended play: hands on with 40 years of English amusement arcades 10 Enriching 'hands on history' through community dissemination: a case study of the Pebble Mill project PART III Labs, archives and museums 11 The Media Archaeology Lab as platform for undoing and reimagining media history 12 Reflections and reminiscences: tactile encounters and participatory research with vintage media technology in the museum 13 A vision in Bakelite: exploring the aesthetic, material and operational potential of the Bush TV22 14 Hands on circuits: preserving the semantic surplus of circuit-level functionality with programmable logic devices Index