GCSC Keynote Lecture: "The Coming of the Dial: Crisis Historiography and Network Visualization"
GCSC Keynote Lecture, Brían Hanrahan (Cornell), Di 08.07.2014, 18-20 Uhr
- https://www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns/veranstaltungen/vortraege/gcsc-keynote-hanrahan
- GCSC Keynote Lecture: "The Coming of the Dial: Crisis Historiography and Network Visualization"
- 2014-07-08T18:00:00+02:00
- 2014-07-08T20:00:00+02:00
- GCSC Keynote Lecture, Brían Hanrahan (Cornell), Di 08.07.2014, 18-20 Uhr
08.07.2014 von 18:00 bis 20:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC200)
International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), room 001, Alter Steinbacher Weg 38
Abstract
Misled by the naïve
formalism of contemporary diagrammatics, we tend to conceive of network
visualization in an abstract and ahistorical way. The lecture challenges this
tendency through an analysis of cinematic representations of the "coming
of the dial" to the telephone network: the rapid introduction, in the 1920s
and 1930s, of the dial interface and associated technologies of automatic
switching and call routing. In dialogue with Rick Altman's notion of a
"crisis historiography" of media, and drawing on an archive composed
– among other things – of recruitment, training and instructional films,
documentaries on cable repair and network history, and comedies of telephone
operators in love, I underline the materiality, heterogeneity and historicity
of telephone networks, and reveal the political stakes of their representation.
Brían Hanrahan
Brían Hanrahan is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University.
Main Research:
- Film and cinema studies
- Acoustic media & auditory culture
- Weimar culture
- 20th and 21st century German cultural history
- Radio history
Publications:
- “Live on the Air, Live on the Ground: the Chamberlin Flight as Spectacular Event, June 1927,” in Thomas O. Haakenson and Jennifer Creech, eds., Spectacle. Peter Lang: German Visual Culture (forthcoming 2014).
- “Varieté (Dupont),” “Redupers: The All-Around Reduced Personality (Sander),” “Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder)” and “Das Boot (Petersen),” in Sabine Haenni and John White, eds. Routledge Encyclopedia of Films. Routledge (forthcoming 2014), 4 x 2500 word essays.
- “The Mobilization of Weimar Radio: Traveling Microphone and Radio-Film,” Transfers: Journal of Mobility Studies, vol. 3, number 2, summer 2013, 4-23
- “For Future Friends of Walter Benjamin,” Los Angeles Review of Books. July 2012.
- “June 13, 1930: German radio broadcasts Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend, a film without images,” in Jennifer Kapczynski and Michael Richardson, eds., A New History of German Cinema. (Rochester: Camden House, 2012), 264-272.