Industrial Origins of the Digital Age

Catalog description

The central focus of this course will be the excavation of textual, visual, and sonic materials, obsolete or emerging. The archaeological metaphor evokes both the desire to recover material traces of the past and the imperative to situate those traces in their social, cultural, and political contexts. How does the digital age imagine backwards to the Industrial Age and vice versa? Is it true that virtually everything that is being invented now for a digital age had its origins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial age? (inventions of telegraphy and telephony, electricity, photography, cinema, the automobile, the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification systems, muckraking and sensationalist journalism, celebrity culture, the skyscraper, the office, the typewriter, the Brownie camera). We will take a research approach that explores moments in which both familiar and unfamiliar devices have yet to emerge as significant or disappear as curiosities.