March 30, 2024

History of Media Studies Newsletter March 2024

History of Media Studies Newsletter March 2024

Welcome to the 37th edition of the History of Media Studies Newsletter. The monthly email, assembled by Dave Park, Jeff Pooley, and Pete Simonson, maintains a loose affiliation with the new History of Media Studies journal and the Working Group on the History of Media Studies. Please contact us with any questions, suggestions, or items.

1. Working Group on the History of Media Studies

Join us for the next remote session devoted to discussing working papers with authors. Hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM). Open to anyone interested in the history of the media studies fields. Instructions to join are here.

Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Wednesday, May 15, 2024, 14:00-15:00 UTC (10:00 am to 11:00 am EDT)

Reading for discussion:

• Angus Burgin (Johns Hopkins University), reading to be announced

For the Zoom link and the reading download, visit the Working Group page. Instructions for joining the group are here. Questions? Contact us

2. Conferences, Calls & Announcements

If you have a call or announcement relevant to the history of media studies, please contact us.

1. CFP: The Making of the Humanities XI, Lund

• In 2024, the eleventh conference in this series on the history of the humanities will be hosted by the Lund Center for the History of Knowledge (LUCK), Lund University. The MoH conferences are organized by the Society for the History of the Humanities and bring together scholars and historians interested in the history of a wide variety of fields, including archaeology, art history, historiography, linguistics, literary studies, media studies, musicology, and philology, tracing these fields from their earliest developments to the modern day. We welcome panels and papers on any period or region. We are especially interested in work that transcends the history of specific humanities disciplines by comparing scholarly practices across disciplines and civilisations.
• Conference dates: 9–11 October, 2024
• Deadline: 1 May 2024
• More details

2. CFP: Society for U.S. Intellectual History

• The 2024 USIH Conference will be a fully in-person meeting in Boston convening on November 14-16 at the Boston Sheraton. Due to the prohibitive costs of hybrid events (in combination with the challenges of making such events pleasant for participants), there will be no hybrid options for presentation or attendance. Within those parameters, we plan to facilitate a conference that is accessible and welcoming to all who identify under USIH’s broad definition of intellectual history as “ideas in action.” We are committed to using the meeting as a venue for strengthening institutional connections to related organizations and contributing to USIH’s ongoing efforts in DEI. The conference theme is “Knowledge and Belief.”
• Conference dates: 14–16 2024
• Deadline: 15 April 2024
• More details

3. CFP: Langer, Creativity, and American Thought: A Conference on the Work and Influence of Susanne Langer

• The Susanne Langer Circle announces an interdisciplinary conference covering all aspects of the thought of Susanne Langer. The conference will be hosted by the American Institute of Philosophical and Cultural Thought (AIPCT), Murphysboro, IL, and by Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC), June 24-28, 2024. The conference is sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy and the Foundation for the Philosophy of Creativity, along with AIPCT and SIUC. The conference will include keynote addresses, an artistic experience, a virtual reality demonstration and experience, and a conference dinner. Most speakers will be presenting in a series of plenary sessions.
• Conference dates: 24–28 June 2024
• Deadline: 31 March 2024
• More details

4. Call for Submissions: 20th Anniversary Issue of The Journal of Community Informatics

• On October 1, 2004, the first issue of The Journal of Community Informatics was published. It has since remained a free and open access, double-blind peer review journal featuring academic research and practitioner contributions at the intersection of CI research, practice, and policy. As a way to celebrate the past 20 years of the journal, and to open up new avenues for participation, we invite original submissions in these traditional formats, as well as new formats including artistic works such as poetry, audio/video recordings, and visual artwork, on topics including the past, present, and future of community informatics; reflections from journal article authors about the impact of their contributions; and personal/professional reflections on CI as a field of research and practice.
• Deadline: 1 May 2024
• More details

5. CFP: Media and Communication. 50 Years of the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication

• In October 2024, the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication celebrates its 50th anniversary. We will celebrate the half-century anniversary of the establishment of the Faculty as a department of Sofia University with a jubilee collection "Media and Communication. 50 Years of the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication". The thematic scope of the collection is broad and includes: research on topics related to the theory, history and transformations of communication, journalism and media; the theory, history and strategies of public communication; the theory, history and development of book publishing and editorial and publishing activities; the theory and research of content management and communication management or comparative theoretical developments in the field of media and communication.
• Deadline: 31 March 2024
• More details

3. The Journal

HMS encourages submissions (en español) on the history of research, education, and reflective knowledge about media and communication—as expressed through academic institutions; through commercial, governmental, and non-governmental organizations; and through “alter-traditions” of thought and practice often excluded from the academic mainstream.

4. New Publications

Works listed here are newly published, or new to the bibliography.

The History of Communication Research Bibliography is a project of the Annenberg School for Communication Library Archives (ASCLA) at the University of Pennsylvania.

1. Ächtler, Norman. "Alfred Andersch, the Cinéma Des Auteurs, and the Poetics of Screenwriting." New German Critique 51, no. 1 (151) (February 1, 2024): 77--107. https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-10926467.

   ABSTRACT: This essay presents a little-known chapter in the film history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Alfred Andersch, founding member of Gruppe 47 and influential broadcast editor, was one of the few authors who was intensively involved with film. The essay reconstructs Andersch's attempt to associate film and literature and thereby develop an alternative concept to the European cinéma des auteurs. To this end, the essay discusses not only Andersch's critical writings but also a number of documents from his estate. Andersch's film theory is evaluated in light of the contemporary literary debate on the medium. His screenplays for the adaptations of his novels Die Rote and Die Entwaffnung are used to examine the conclusions Andersch drew regarding film aesthetics in his own poetics of screenwriting. In sum, the essay reconstructs Andersch's attempt at a literary response to the crisis of West German film around 1960.

2. Bauer, A. J. "Glittering Generalities: Reconsidering the Institute for Propaganda Analysis." International Journal of Communication 18, no. 0 (February 27, 2024): 19.

   ABSTRACT: Political communication and journalism studies scholars have focused on how present conditions have resulted in the epistemological crisis known as "post-truth." This new push toward mis/disinformation studies parallels a movement during the Interwar era, when early mass communication scholars began studying the perils of propaganda. Among media historians, there has been renewed interest in the U.S.-based Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), a short-lived progressive educational initiative concerned with teaching the public how to spot and not be swayed by propaganda campaigns. This article contends that the IPA's public-facing messaging against propaganda masked its own propagandistic aims. Using scientific language and claiming to be above the political fray, the IPA unwittingly exacerbated the problem it claimed to combat. This article concludes by drawing lessons for contemporary communication researchers invested in understanding and counteracting mis/disinformation.

3. D'Arma, Alessandro, Steven Barclay, and Minna Aslama Horowitz. "Public Service Media and the Internet: Two Decades in Review." International Journal of Communication 18, no. 0 (December 26, 2023): 20.

   ABSTRACT: Since the beginning of the 21st century, public service broadcasters (PSBs) have been confronted with the rise of the Internet as a mainstream medium of communication. This has sparked a debate on the transition from PSB to public service media (PSM). In this article, we present a review of the academic literature on PSM and the Internet produced from 2000 to 2021. We focus on contributions interrogating the implications of PSM's online activities for the delivery of public service values. We identify seven streams of research and show how, as a whole, this body of work has highlighted the main tensions and dilemmas that PSM organizations have faced, given their special nature, when engaging with the technological affordances of the Internet. Researchers have also shown how the delivery of public value can be enhanced via PSM's online services. Arguing for the continued relevance of PSM, they have reasserted traditional values while also identifying new roles that PSM are called to play in the context of today's digital communications.

4. Drimmer, Sonja. "Hildegard von Bingen's Scivias in Weimar Germany: Media Theory by Hand." Modern Language Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2023): 443--64. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10779255.

   ABSTRACT: Between 1929 and 1930 a feud over the legitimacy of reproductions of works of art erupted in the pages of the culture periodical Der Kreis. Later dubbed the Hamburg Facsimile Debate, the dispute involved many of the day's most eminent curators and academics in art and art history and became a focal point for emerging ideas about authenticity and the educative impact of the replica in the Weimar Republic. Even as the intelligentsia were publicly quarreling over the epistemological stakes of the facsimile, four nuns at Eibingen Abbey were meticulously hand-copying the most renowned illuminated twelfth-century manuscript of Hildegard von Bingen's visionary summa, Scivias. This essay pits the Facsimile Debate against the facsimile craft of the Eibingen nuns, situating both within the context of new reproductive technologies devised specifically for representing medieval artifacts. It argues for a historicizing approach to the notion of authenticity, which bears on how we think about mediation and the surrogate in our research and teaching today.

5. Elcott, Noam M. "Art in the First Screen Age: László Moholy-Nagy and the Affordances of Surfaces, Canvases, and Scrims." New German Critique 51, no. 1 (151) (February 1, 2024): 33--76. https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-10926453.

   ABSTRACT: Unlike English or French, early twentieth-century German did not adopt a single term for "screen." Instead, a range of terms--and practices--proliferated. This essay explores three terms and practices developed especially within avant-garde circles: Fläche (surface), Leinwand (canvas), and Schirm (scrim). Fläche was championed as material and real; Leinwand was dismissed as immaterial and illusionistic. Schirm, however, challenged these oppositions. Rather than succumb to the traditional avant-garde choice between material reality and immaterial illusion, László Moholy-Nagy advanced a third option: the immaterial reality of Schirme, that is, phantasmagoric presences in our real time and real space.

6. Foltz, Jonathan. "Close Reading/Mass Media: I. A. Richards's Screen Tests." Modern Language Quarterly 84, no. 4 (December 1, 2023): 529--50. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10779237.

   ABSTRACT: This article explores the overlapping histories of close reading and mass media by attending to the late-career film and television experiments of I. A. Richards. A lifelong critic of the entertainment industry and (arguably reactionary) media theorist, Richards also spent decades experimenting with the exacting and humbling realities of media production. Spanning his abandoned collaboration with Disney, a series of Basic English teaching films (made with the artist and filmmaker Len Lye), his two educational television programs on poetry, and a number of unrealized television adaptations of Plato and Homer, this article surveys the extensive and ambivalent record of Richards's ventures into media production. It details his painstaking efforts to reimagine and remediate the experience of poetry and the act of reading in terms of complex multisensory channels of audiovisual stimuli, positioning film and television as ideal media for poetry and as unlikely saviors of a Western humanism in crisis. Literary history, Richards suggests, can no longer be considered merely literary; if it survives, it will do so only as part of an evolving history of media.

7. Guillory, John. "The Words on the Screen: I. A. Richards as Media Theorist." Modern Language Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2023): 509--27. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10779264.

   ABSTRACT: This essay takes as its point of departure the later writing of I. A. Richards, which never achieved the influence of his famous books of the 1920s. In these later writings Richards was concerned largely with issues in language education and, relatedly, with the emergence of new media, chiefly visual media. Richards attempted in this later work to adapt new media such as television to the teaching of language, as well as to the teaching of literature. In the 1950s he attempted to use television to teach his audience how to read works of poetry. These experiments failed because his use of new media was premature, inadequate to his ambitious aims. Nonetheless, his anticipation of our obsession with "screens" was prescient and is worth a careful reconsideration.

8. Kiséry, András, and David Nee. "Old 'New Media' and Literary Studies before 1960." Modern Language Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2023): 395--412. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10817053.

   ABSTRACT: New media played an important but largely understudied role in the formation of literary studies as a discipline. The dominant tradition of literary criticism has implied that literature was superior to and fully distinct from competing media and that the methods and concepts of literary scholarship were untouched by the emergence of new technological media. This introduction surveys some of the ways in which modern literary scholarship was in fact entangled with new media: from the revolutionary effect of the photostat on textual studies, to the rise of the concept of "orality" in tandem with new techniques for transcribing sound, to twentieth-century literary scholars' extensive experiments with film and video as novel pedagogical aids. Along with the contributions to this special issue, this introduction shows that revisiting the false starts and dead ends of media-attuned literary scholarship during this formative period can help us defamiliarize our own convictions and open up alternative visions for the place of literary studies in a media-saturated world.

9. Kiséry, András. "Modern Humanities and the Ancient Book: Karl Kerényi's Media Theory." Modern Language Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2023): 487--508. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10779273.

   ABSTRACT: Karl Kerényi is now mostly remembered for his monographs on Greek mythological figures in the Bollingen Series and for his collaboration with Carl Gustav Jung from the 1940s on. The radical approach to mythology reflected in this work was Kerényi's solution to what he perceived as a crisis of the humanities: a disciplinary fragmentation combined with the growing influence of the social sciences in the study of culture. Before he would have turned to the study of myth, Kerényi proposed media history as the foundation for the renewal of classical studies and the humanities in general. In a series of essays written in the 1930s, Kerényi theorized the media of ancient texts as central to cultural hermeneutics. His understanding of textual media as expressive of the essential characteristics of a culture was underpinned by a conservative-humanist critique of modernity. It shows strong affinities with the work of such figures as the cultural theorist Oswald Spengler. Offered as an alternative to what Kerényi considered the scientistic preoccupations rampant in modern academe, this vision is also clearly at odds with most later media-historical research and its interest in the affordances and social ramifications of the materiality of communication technologies.

10. Mowlana, Hamid. "Ibn Khaldun: His Contribution to Communication Science." The Journal of International Communication 30, no. 1 (January 2, 2024): 1--12. https://doi.org/10.1080/13216597.2024.2303169.

    ABSTRACT: Abdul Rahman Ibn Khaldun is one of the most significant figures in the history of social sciences. He is also an outstanding thinker in the history. This article deals with the contribution of Ibn Khaldun to communication science and his pioneering works in the field of international and intercultural communication studies of the Islamic world. He is considered by many as the founder of sociology. His typology on cyclical pattern of history and his theories on political economy, demography, and environmental sciences have earned him a prominent place among the major intellectuals in the history of social thought.

11. Nee, David. "From 'Gestural Language' to 'Language Gesture': André Jolles, Aby Warburg, and the Morphology of Mass Media." Modern Language Quarterly 84, no. 4 (December 1, 2023): 413--42. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10806507.

    ABSTRACT: André Jolles's Simple Forms (1929), widely regarded as a classic of genre theory, examines a range of folkloric and nonauthorial forms, such as the fairy tale, the riddle, and the joke, as part of an ambitious attempt to reground literary theory in a "morphological" approach to language inspired, ultimately, by Goethean science. This article argues that Jolles's study should also be recognized as an important early work of media theory. Simple Forms includes a striking number of examples drawn from the mass-market newspapers of Jolles's day. In turning to mass media, Jolles followed in the footsteps of the art historian Aby Warburg, whose Mnemosyne Atlas (1924--29) similarly juxtaposed mass-media images from newspapers with works of art from earlier historical periods. The article details how Warburg's morphological method helped Jolles expand the boundaries of literary study to include mass media by providing him with a morphological version of the motif concept that still has generative applications.

12. Newman, Jane O. "Philology Goes to the Movies: The Task of the Critic in Kracauer and Auerbach." Modern Language Quarterly 84, no. 4 (2023): 465--85. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-10779246.

    ABSTRACT: The older and allegedly more conventional humanistic discipline of philology and the field of the "new" media of film that were emerging into their maturity in the early twentieth century are not commonly aligned. The institutional spaces they occupied--a cloistered academy and the popular "public sphere"--are seen as antithetical to one another. Letters between the contemporaries Erich Auerbach and Siegfried Kracauer suggest another story. This essay explores Auerbach's and Kracauer's interest in the enormous power of the cultural products they studied: the plays of seventeenth-century French classicisme and the mass-produced cinema of the early twentieth century, respectively, in critical fashion. Auerbach's familiarity with Kracauer's early essays may have alerted him to questions at the heart of the latter's critique of the culture industry and helps explain the remarkable agreement between Kracauer's account, in essays written during the mid- to late 1920s, of how a modern urban public "consumed" movies and Auerbach's description of the audiences of early modern French tragedy in the to all appearances highly academic book The French Public of the Seventeenth Century, completed in 1933.

13. Simonson, Peter. "The Making of Elihu Katz, 1926--1956: Generations and Ethnoreligious Identities in the Transnational Development of Communication Studies." International Journal of Communication 18 (February 27, 2024): 24.

    ABSTRACT: Elihu Katz (1926--2021) was among the leading media researchers of the 20th century, making major contributions to the fields of communication, sociology, and public opinion research over a 7-decade career. His life is both significant in its own right and a window into broader historical developments: He was a member of the first generation of Jewish-born scholars to enjoy relatively unconstrained career possibilities in the United States and among a group of American-educated scholars who helped develop the social sciences in Israel, where he established the field of communication. This article, guided by the concepts of generations and opportunity structures, provides a sociologically infused intellectual biography of the young Katz as shaped by historically specific patterns of social communication and ethnoreligious identity. It shows how his lifelong thought style came into place by the time he was 30 and throws new light on the transnational development of communication studies in its formative, mid-century period.

14. Zhu, Xiaole, Yeajin Joo, and Yoonjae Nam. "Bibliometric Analysis on the Research Trend of over the Top Platforms--Focusing on Social Science Research on Netflix from 2001 to 2020." International Journal of Communication 18 (February 14, 2024): 20.

    ABSTRACT: This study examined trends in Netflix research in the social sciences over the past two decades through bibliometric analysis. Using the Scopus database, we extracted 269 articles and analyzed the topics that received the most attention in Netflix research through keyword co-occurrence network analysis. The analysis revealed that the most frequently co-occurring keywords were "Netflix," "television," "streaming," "recommendation system," and "SVOD." We also identified influential social science journals and research articles related to Netflix. Based on these analyses, this study provides comprehensive insights into the progress and intellectual structure of research on over-the-top (OTT) platforms. We expect that this will enhance our understanding of the overall development of research on OTT platforms and provide useful guidance for future researchers in this field.