Lisa Gitelman

Welcome to the Bubble Chamber: Online in the Humanities Today

New scholarly resources are undoubtedly helping to change the methods of inquiry in media history and the humanities more broadly. However, this essay raises the question of the ways in which they are also helping to change the substance of that inquiry. Any satisfying approach to this issue must entail multiple strands. The author uses an analogy to the field of particle physics to illustrate the multiple issues this question raises and to suggest some possible answers.

Negotiating a Vocabulary for Urban Infrastructure, Or, The WPA Meets the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Though historians of technology generally work toward detailed case studies of individual machines or industries, a few voices have lately been raised in a call for broader perspectives. In a recent review essay, Josef W. Konvitz, Mark H. Rose and Joel A. Tarr urge an intellectual history of urban technologies. The discipline that treats the spinning jenny and the cotton gin must also equip itself to analyze the varied and complex technological systems present in the modern city. Only with such a broad vision will the relationships between technology and culture become clear. One helpful version of such an overview has been offered by Rosalind Williamss historical and literary meditations on underground technological environments. But Williamss focus upon nineteenth-century culture has led her to ignore the American experience almost entirely. Bound by Leo Marxs paradigmatic “machine in the garden,” Williams dismisses America in favor of Britain and France, where underground technology first entered the modern landscape. A twentieth-century focus, however, reveals a rich and complex intellectual history of urban technology within the American scene. The built environment of New York City, in particular, has dominated contemporary American expressions of the relationship between culture and technology.