Data

As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas.

The future of historiography seems to belong to Public History Thomas Cauvin author of the path breaking book Public History A Textbook of Practice, even argues that we should all become public historians. In his book and as a public historian he explored fields as different as brewing and food history digital public history controversies over monuments public history as empowerment and the possibility of an international public history.

The automated enrichment of mass-digitised document collections using techniques such as text mining is becoming increasingly popular. Enriched collections offer new opportunities for interface design to allow data-driven and visualisation-based search, exploration and interpretation. Most such interfaces integrate close and distant reading and represent semantic, spatial, social or temporal relations, but often lack contrastive views.

Stefan Krebs and Heike Weber historicise the concept of "repairing things" with a view to broadening and redefining the emphasis of current debates on repair as a "new social movement" and the emergence of a "repair society". These current discourses often lack a sense of the long history of repairing things which saw ups and downs in cultures of repair and self-repair. The chapter charts out the heterogeneity and interrelatedness of the actors involved in repair over time.

Stefan Krebs uses the case of Germany to investigate maintenance and repair as a central part of automobility. The chapter will look at two sides of car repair as the need to maintain the mobility function and the practice of a hobbyist consumer activity that promised status, community and identity. It highlights four aspects that framed repair as a necessary part of car consumption: the (un-)reliability of automobile technology; the emergence of a car repair infrastructure; repair costs, which determined to a large extent whether one could afford to drive a car; and DIY repair practices.

Ce numéro de Signata vise à poser la question de l’archive d’un point de vue sémiotique et sémio-pragmatique. On entend ici par « sémiotique » non pas une discipline unique, mais une pluralité de manières de questionner le sens, les formes et les valeurs au sein des disciplines historiques, sociologiques, philosophiques, linguistiques, médiatiques, artistiques, etc. Le but du dossier est ainsi la constitution d’une cartographie qui embrasse les différentes approches qui, dans le domaine de l’archive, peuvent faire émerger les questionnements liés au sens.

French translation of the article "Technostalgia of the present: from technologies of memory to a memory of technologies" (2015): https://necsus-ejms.org/technostalgia-present-technologies-memory-memory....

The paper looks at a global, non-commercial organization that not only steered worldwide innovation in communication infrastructure but also made efforts to define ethical standards for media use and mass communication. Established after the Second World War, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) ran campaigns in the late 1940s to remove information barriers and foster the free flow of information throughout the world.