Data

The visual turn recovers new pasts. With a focus on education, this book seeks to present a body of reflections that question a certain historicism. It renovates historiographical debate about how to conceptualize visual media while presenting new themes and methods for researchers. Images are interrogated as part of régimes of the visible, of a history of visual technologies and visual practices.

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.

Recension de Jérôme Denis, Le Travail invisible des données. Éléments pour une sociologie des infrastructures scripturales, Paris, Presses des Mines, 2018, 206 pages

Recension de l'ouvrage de Florence Descamps, Archiver la mémoire. De l’histoire orale au patrimoine immatériel, Paris, Éd. de l'EHESS, 2019, 241 pages

This dissertation consists of two parts. In the first part, the focus lies on the study of trade and transport networks in the Gaulish and German provinces during the Roman Empire based on inscriptions. Different approaches are used to tackle this topic, e.g. networks between different people and families, organisations and cities. The results show that networks between merchants or merchant families likely existed with the aim of securing and improving one’s own position in the business world.

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.