Rise of the Modern Mediatrix: The Feminization of Media and Mediating Labor, 1865-1945

This dissertation uncovers a vast archive of fictional female telegraph, telephone, and typewriter girls, combining rigorous historical research with feminist, psychoanalytic readings of mass cultural texts to show how the global gendering of low-level communication work shaped modern media. It begins in the United States, where women first performed this work, and explores three further national contexts (France, Germany, and Britain) where female operators and typists circulated as media icons of techno-social connection in an increasingly atomized age. The title “modern mediatrix” describes the essential mediating role white-collar woman workers have played in modern media infrastructure, from switchboard to editing bench. This role has been promoted by corporations, nations, and mass media as feminine for over a century. Across four chapters that engage ad campaigns, plays, novels, and films, I reveal the modern mediatrix to be a uniquely flexible character, capable of creating continuity across industrial ruptures and activating new narrative forms. To trace this character’s construction, I tie her unique semiotic tools and social skills to evolving Christian notions of sanctified feminine transmission, weaving as women’s work, and Hollywood’s reliance on an invisible feminized clerical proletariat. Media scholars who point out telegraphs and typewriters still rarely note the girl behind the machine. For too long, my field has clung to the male factory worker as an all-purpose archetype for cinematic labor and depicted female tech users at home, alone, in the thrall of the apparatus. Instead, my project proposes the rise of the modern mediatrix as an essential theoretical and material foundation for film and media studies. Each of my chapters explores a different facet of the modern mediatrix. I begin in the 1860s, when Western Union began recruiting lady telegraphers and the Catholic Church premiered its Blessing of the Telegraph, with Mary cast as a pure channel for man’s natural use of electricity. Framed by this techno-romantic mother-figure, Chapter 1 examines three teenage girls enshrined in US popular history as the first users of the telegraph, telephone, and typewriter. I show how inventors and companies used virginal foremothers to claim paternity over communications technologies and their feminized workforces. Chapter 2 argues Bell’s speech-weaver ad campaigns coded onscreen operators as vernacular translators of transitional cinematic syntax. Highlighting telephone girls’ enlistment as temp techno-pedagogues during US film’s introduction of cross-cutting and European film’s polyglot transition to sound, it offers women’s film-weaving labor as an alternative to the surgical rhetoric (suture) and patriarchal authorship model typically used to historicize film editing conventions. Chapter 3 traces the secretary’s construction as an automatic audience member in interwar European modernist media. Suggesting that the hypnotic effects of taking dictation stoked Weimar-era anxieties about women workers’ receptivity to media-savvy fascist dictators, it catalogs secretarial symptoms that trouble Frankfurt school divisions of worker-spectators into shocked factory workers and absorbed little shopgirls. Chapter 4 uses the metallic echoes of taps to read Astaire-Rogers musicals as anxious allegories for the Production Code’s reliance on typists, and as encrypted channels to two fleetingly feminized languages, Morse and binary code. A postwar coda draws out the clerical conduit’s transgressive potential, hinted at by her narrative flexibility and explicitly reclaimed in the 1970s and 80s by feminist filmmakers and techno-scientists. With access to the codes of information capitalism, virginal electric muses and hysterical film fans became canny decipherers of mystified techno-cultural matrilineages

Performing Identity: The Literary, Technological and Digital Evolution of the American Self

This research aims to analyze how the concept of the American Self has changed starting with technological advancements in the 1880s, and then demonstrating how literature and identity have been challenged by technology and the New Media today. The research will specifically focus on the evolution of American Identity, altered by technological interaction, and the consequent redefinition of concepts such as individualism, privacy, freedom and selfhood. As such, the project will look at those novels in American literature that illustrate the evolution and consequent redefinition of identity through technological and digital change. As literary analysis demonstrates, this thesis will examine the complex alteration of identity through technological advancements, ranging from one of the first means of communication, the telegraph, to the Internet. The novels that will be analyzed are: Wired Love- A Romance of Dots and Dashes (1879) by Ella Cheever Thayer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\u2019s Court (1889) by Mark Twain, The Broom of the System (1987) by David Foster Wallace, Chronic City (2009) by Jonathan Lethem and Jennifer Egan\u2019s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010). The trajectory of this project, from the late 19th century to our contemporary age, will trace an arc from the origin of communication technologies to modern digitalization. Examining technology and identity through the lens of literature, this research will attempt to demonstrate how communication technologies have shaped a new concept of American identity, rewritten in front of the screen and repositioned in the dense network of virtual interactions

Evaluation in natural language processing

quot; European Summer School on Language Logic and Information(ESSLLI 2007)(Trinity College Dublin Ireland 6-17 August 2007

Sublanguage, text type and machine translation

This thesis explores the domains of sublanguage, machine translation and textual analysis. Chapter 1 discusses the definitions and characteristics of sublanguage put forward by researchers to date, as well as the background of textual analysis in linguistics. This discussion reveals that, although there is much to be gained from textual analysis, little consideration has been given to the notion of "text" in the sublanguage approach to machine translation (MT). Before any sublanguage analysis can proceed, compilation of a corpus is necessary. To date, attention has been focussed on the criteria for compiling general language corpora. Chapter 2 addresses the problems of compiling corpora for sublanguage research and offers guidelines for this purpose. An exploration of the advantages of considering text type and communicative function in the sublanguage approach to MT is the focus of Chapter 3. Three text types with a similar communicative function from the same highly restricted sublanguage domain are compared for linguistic features which cause semantic, syntactic and lexical ambiguities. Finally, Chapter 4 summarises and evaluates the results obtained in Chapter 3. Conclusions are drawn about "text type" and communicative function and about the advantages of considering "text" for MT

Codes of Modernity: Infrastructures of Language and Chinese Scripts in an Age of Global Information Revolution

This dissertation explores the global history of Chinese script reforms—the effort to phoneticize Chinese language and/or simplify the writing system—from its inception in the 1890s to its demise in the 1980s. These reforms took place at the intersection of industrialization, colonialism, and new information technologies, such as alphabet-based telegraphy and breakthroughs in printing technologies. As these social and technological transformations put unprecedented pressure on knowledge management and the use of mental and clerical labor, many Chinese intellectuals claimed that learning Chinese characters consumed too much time and mental energy. Chinese script reforms, this dissertation argues, were an effort to increase speed in producing, transmitting, and accessing information, and thus meet the demands of the industrializing knowledge economy. The industrializing knowledge economy that this dissertation explores was built on and sustained by a psychological understanding of the human subject as a knowledge machine, and it was part of a global moment in which the optimization of labor in knowledge production was a key concern for all modernizing economies. While Chinese intellectuals were inventing new signs of inscription, American behavioral psychologists, Soviet psycho-economists, and Central Asian and Ottoman technicians were all experimenting with new scripts in order to increase mental efficiency and productivity. This dissertation reveals the intimate connections between the Chinese and non-Chinese script engineering projects that were taking place synchronically across the world. The chapters of this work demonstrate for the first time, for instance, that the simplification of Chinese characters in the 1920s and 1930s was intimately connected to the discipline of behavioral psychology in the US. The first generation of Chinese psychologists employed the American psychologists’ methods to track eye movements, count word-frequencies, and statistically analyze the speed of reading, writing, and memorizing in order to simplify and “rationalize” the Chinese writing system in an effort to discipline and optimize mental labor. Other chapters explore the issue of mental and clerical optimization by finding the origins of the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), the mother of pinyin, in hitherto unknown Eurasian connections. The CLA, the pages of this work shows, was the product of a transnational exchange that involved Ottoman and Transcaucasian typographers as well as Russian engineers and Chinese communists who sought efficiency in knowledge production through inventing new scripts. Situating the Chinese script reforms at this global intersection of psychology, economy, and linguistics, this dissertation examines the global connections and forces that turned the human subject into a knowledge worker who was cognitively managed through education, literacy, propaganda, and other measures of organizing information, all of which had the script at the center. The search for efficiency and productivity—the core values of industrialism—lay at the heart of script reforms in China, but this search was inseparable from linguistic orders and political ambitions. Even if writing, transmitting, and learning a phonetic script could theoretically be easier and more efficient than the Chinese characters, the alphabet opened a veritable Pandora’s Box around the issue of selection: given the complex linguistic landscape in China, which speech was a phonetic script supposed to represent? There were myriad languages spoken throughout the empire and the subsequent nation-state, most of which were mutually incomprehensible. Mandarin as spoken in Beijing was different from that spoken in the south, and “topolects” or regional languages such as Min or Cantonese were to Mandarin what Romanian is to English. As a linguistic life-or-death issue, phonetic scripts stood for the infrastructural possibilities and limitations in the representation of speeches. Some scripts, such as Lao Naixuan’s phonetic script composed of more than a hundred signs, were capable of representing multiple Mandarin and non-Mandarin speeches; whereas others, such as Phonetic Symbols that only has thirty-seven syllabic signs, represented only one speech, i.e., Mandarin. Using Mandarin-oriented scripts to transcribe non-Mandarin speeches was like writing English with fifteen letters, hence the acrimonious disputes that fill the pages of this dissertation. Succinctly put, it was at the level of script invention that Chinese and non-Chinese actors engineered different infrastructures not only for laboring minds but also for the social world of Chinese languages. The history of information technologies and knowledge economy in China was thus inseparable from the world of speech and language, as each script offered a new potential to reassemble the written matter and the speaking mind in a different way. “Codes of Modernity” thus conceptualizes the script itself as an infrastructural medium. A script was not merely a passive carrier of information, but an existential artifact. Building on an expanding literature on infrastructures, it endorses the observation that infrastructures, technologies, and the social world around them work in a recursive loop. An infrastructure is not just the physical object that permits the flow of information, goods, ideas, and people, but a sociotechnical product that enables the experience of culture, while imposing constrains on it at the same time. Like electricity grids, transportation systems, and sewage canals, the experience of scripts as infrastructures is the experience of thought worlds. After a long tradition of structuralism and poststructuralism that sought to understand the world through the semiotic prism of language, “Codes of Modernity” argues that it is time for an infrastructuralism that excavates the indispensable media that enable the production of language and thought

Probability, cryptology and meaning in Claude Shannon (1916-2001)’s works

International audienceBetween 1943 and 1949, the engineer and mathematician Claude Shannon (1916-2001) developped a new theory, foundedon the measure of « information quantity ». Clearly, this quantifying design of information was supported by the theory ofprobability. But it was also fostered by cryptology, which Shannon also worked to innovate in the same period, for the needs of World War II and of its consequences. The first interest of my talk is to make explicit the relationship between informtion theory and cryptology in Shannon’s inventive approach.The reception of this Shannon’s work was often accompanied by a specific claim, that is, by introducing prabability theory in this domain, whereby Shannon effectuated a radical break between « information » and « meaning ». Nevertheless, Shannon’s texts insisted very systématically on the meaning of his work for the engineer. They rather introduced the idea that meaning depends on the observer’s point of view, specifically, that of the engineer who manages the whole communication system. In that way, they ar linked with the 20th century theories of language, especially the pragmatic realm. I inted to examine the epistemological involvements of the reception modalities of this information theory

Chinese character processing for computerized bibliographic information exchange : summary report of an international workshop held in Hong Kong, 17-20 Dec. 1984

Meeting: Workshop on Chinese Character Processing for Computerized Bibliographic Applications, 17-20 Dec. 1984, H

Communication in Transition: Telecommunication Technology in British and American Literature 1880–1913

In the nineteenth century new modes of communication created a wide variety of problems and concerns for their users. In addition to simple cases of mistaken identity and missed messages, telecommunications made possible previously inconceivable feats of instantaneous distance communications, which caused in some users crises of place and person as well as confusion and/or interruption in their understanding of location, distance, and even embodiment. These concerns are visible across texts and genres, appearing in novels, short stories, mystical narratives, and journalism. Moreover, as the telegram and telephone became more prevalent, authors also employed telecommunications within their texts as indications of character types and stereotypes. Combined, these elements helped to generate an unprecedented sphere of intrigue and concern around telecommunication and invention. I argue that understanding turn-of-the-century telecommunications is critical because of its role in the era’s historic sociological changes and how literature displays that relationship. In addition, this project shows how these technologies differ from the other developments of the time, evidenced by instantaneous (and in the case of the telephone, voiced but faceless) communication causing feelings of disembodiment and displacement for users and the birth of concerns over disruption, information overload, and miscommunication. Ultimately, this project will show that the use of telecommunications in the fiction is symbolic of major socio-historic changes taking place at the turn of the century and that the technology itself created many changes, including individuals’ conceptions of time, space, and place

The Cryptographic Imagination

Originally published in 1996. In The Cryptographic Imagination, Shawn Rosenheim uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity, and technology. Rosenheim argues that Poe's cryptographic writing—his essays on cryptography and the short stories that grew out of them—requires that we rethink the relation of poststructural criticism to Poe's texts and, more generally, reconsider the relation of literature to communication. Cryptography serves not only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much of Poe's late fiction (including his creation, the detective story) but also as a "secret history" of literary modernity itself. "Both postwar fiction and literary criticism," the author writes, "are deeply indebted to the rise of cryptography in World War II." Still more surprising, in Rosenheim's view, Poe is not merely a source for such literary instances of cryptography as the codes in Conan Doyle's "The Dancing-Men" or in Jules Verne, but, through his effect on real cryptographers, Poe's writing influenced the outcome of World War II and the development of the Cold War. However unlikely such ideas sound, The Cryptographic Imagination offers compelling evidence that Poe's cryptographic writing clarifies one important avenue by which the twentieth century called itself into being. "The strength of Rosenheim's work extends to a revisionistic understanding of the entirety of literary history (as a repression of cryptography) and then, in a breathtaking shift of register, interlinks Poe's exercises in cryptography with the hyperreality of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Internet. What enables this extensive range of applications is the stipulated tension Rosenheim discerns in the relationship between the forms of the literary imagination and the condition of its mode of production. Cryptography, in this account, names the technology of literary production—the diacritical relationship between decoding and encoding—that the literary imagination dissimulates as hieroglyphics—the hermeneutic relationship between a sign and its content."—Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth Colleg