Reclaiming the Future with Old Media

In this piece Emerson first unpacks why and how the past keeps getting eclipsed by an ever-receding future we seem to have little to no control over. She then proposes six interrelated values we might take from old media: slow, small, open, cooperative, care, and failure. All six values are intentionally opposed to: ungrounded speculation; early adoption in the name of disruption, innovation, and progress; and convenient quick-fixes. Rather than recapitulate these same logics and claim her argument is wholly new or groundbreaking, and contrary to those who have been named as participating in the “dark side of DH” with practices that are “rooted in technocratic rationality or neoliberal economic calculus,” she instead gathers together tactics that many DH community members have already embraced and reframe them in relation to recovering past media traditions for the sake of a reimagined future

Reclaiming the Future with Old Media

In this piece Emerson first unpacks why and how the past keeps getting eclipsed by an ever-receding future we seem to have little to no control over. She then proposes six interrelated values we might take from old media: slow, small, open, cooperative, care, and failure. All six values are intentionally opposed to: ungrounded speculation; early adoption in the name of disruption, innovation, and progress; and convenient quick-fixes. Rather than recapitulate these same logics and claim her argument is wholly new or groundbreaking, and contrary to those who have been named as participating in the &ldquo;dark side of DH&rdquo; with practices that are &ldquo;rooted in technocratic rationality or neoliberal economic calculus,&rdquo; she instead gathers together tactics that many DH community members have already embraced and reframe them in relation to recovering past media traditions for the sake of a reimagined future.</p

The lost histories of alternative Internets

Some years ago, in 2014, a simple but far from trivial pin found its way to the lab I direct, the Media Archaeology Lab. The pin reads, &ldquo;Ask Me About INTERnet.&rdquo; Shortly before its arrival, I had read Howard Rheingold&rsquo;s 1993 The Virtual Community and found myself startled by his strange use of &ldquo;internet,&rdquo; the noun floating free of its article. In the following months, as I pursued my research on the history of pre-internet networks, I increasingly noticed the absence of &ldquo;the&rdquo; before &ldquo;internet&rdquo; in a host of other venues. Slogging my way through manuals on internet protocols, especially for TCP/IP (short for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol and officially adopted in 1983 as the standard language for networks to communicate with each other), I could see the ways in which, despite all the shoulder-shrugging about the origins of &ldquo;the internet,&rdquo; that singular, monolithic network governing our waking lives, this network of networks had in fact emerged from decades of inchoate heterogeneity that could have gone in any number of directions.</p

Afterword: A Variantology of Hands-On Practice

The essays in this special issue offer us compelling and inventive pedagogical strategies for effectively transporting artefacts and technological media from the past to the present and even for transporting our experiences of contemporary media from the present to (the recreation of) a possible experience in the past. In short, these strategies are relevant for any scholar working with technological media in a historical register from within any field and any time period. From Meredith Bak&rsquo;s details of her playful media archaeological experimentations with optical toys in the classroom to Peter J. Bloom&rsquo;s delving into the vectors of meaning that emerge from juxtapositions of media artefacts in collections, Christina Corfield&rsquo;s account of paper-based reconstructions of optical devices, Robby Gilbert&rsquo;s narrative about how he reveals the mechanisms behind the illusion of movement by excavating basic principles of movement and time in the zoetrope, and Gert Jan Harkema and Andr&eacute; Rosendaal&rsquo;s argument for the importance of classroom activities that rely on touch via Virtual Reality as a way to teach film, all provide us with ways to give students or, broadly speaking, users an alternate access point to history other than through more well-worn methods of narrativization via text or images.</p

Did We Dream Enough? THE THING BBS as an Experiment in Social-Cyber Sculpture

This&nbsp;article was commissioned alongside&nbsp;a restoration of The Thing BBS&nbsp;as part of the research project &ldquo;Early Online Communities in Context,&rdquo; which was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is published to coincide with &ldquo;We=Link: Sideways,&rdquo; an online exhibition organized by Chronus Art Center.</p

As If, or, Using Media Archaeology to Reimagine Past, Present, and Future: An Interview with Lori Emerson

Jay Kirby, PhD student in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program at North Carolina State University, conducted this interview with Associate Professor Lori Emerson to focus on her research about how interfaces and the material aspects of media devices affect our uses and relationships with those devices. Emerson, who runs the University of Colorado’s Media Archaeology Lab, explains how we can look at older technology that never became an economic success to imagine what could have been and reimagine what is and what could be. In the Media Archaeology Lab, Emerson collects still-functioning media artifacts to demonstrate these different possibilities. In this interview, Emerson draws on examples from digital computer interfaces, word processors, and other older media to show how their material aspects are bound up in cultural, commercial, and political apparatuses. By bringing these issues to light, Emerson shows how a critical eye toward our media can have far reaching implications

Agronomic responses of corn to stand reducation at vegetative growth stages

Yield loss charts for hail associated with stand reduction assume that remaining plants lose the ability to compensate for lost plants by mid-vegetative growth. Yield losses and stand losses after V8 – leaf collar system – and throughout the remaining vegetative stages are 1:1 according to the current standards. We conducted field experiments from 2006 to 2009 at twelve site-years in Illinois, Iowa, and Ohio to determine responses of corn to stand reduction at the fifth, eighth, eleventh, and fifteenth leaf collar stages (V5, V8, V11, and V15, respectively). We also wanted to know whether these responses varied between uniform and random patterns of stand reduction with differences in within-row interplant spacing. When compared to a control of 36,000 plants per acre, grain yield decreased linearly as stand reduction increased from 16.7 to 50% (Table 3), but was not affected by the pattern of stand reduction. This rate of yield loss was greatest when stand reduction occurred at V11 or V15, and least when it occurred at V5. With 50% stand loss, yield was 83 and 69% of the control when stand loss occurred at V5 and V15, respectively. With 16.7% stand loss at V5, V8, or V11, yield averaged 96% of the control. Per-plant grain yield increased when stand loss occurred earlier and was more severe. With 50% stand loss at V11 or V15, per-plant grain yield increased by 37 to 46% compared to the control. Corn retains the ability to compensate for lost plants through the late vegetative stages, indicating that current standards for assessing the effect of stand loss in corn should be reevaluated

Maize Leaf Appearance Rates: A Synthesis From the United States Corn Belt

The relationship between collared leaf number and growing degree days (GDD) is crucial for predicting maize phenology. Biophysical crop models convert GDD accumulation to leaf numbers by using a constant parameter termed phyllochron (°C-day leaf−1) or leaf appearance rate (LAR; leaf oC-day−1). However, such important parameter values are rarely estimated for modern maize hybrids. To fill this gap, we sourced and analyzed experimental datasets from the United States Corn Belt with the objective to (i) determine phyllochron values for two types of models: linear (1-parameter) and bilinear (3-parameters; phase I and II phyllochron, and transition point) and (ii) explore whether environmental factors such as photoperiod and radiation, and physiological variables such as plant growth rate can explain variability in phyllochron and improve predictability of maize phenology. The datasets included different locations (latitudes between 48° N and 41° N), years (2009–2019), hybrids, and management settings. Results indicated that the bilinear model represented the leaf number vs. GDD relationship more accurately than the linear model (R2 = 0.99 vs. 0.95, n = 4,694). Across datasets, first phase phyllochron, transition leaf number, and second phase phyllochron averaged 57.9 ± 7.5°C-day, 9.8 ± 1.2 leaves, and 30.9 ± 5.7°C-day, respectively. Correlation analysis revealed that radiation from the V3 to the V9 developmental stages had a positive relationship with phyllochron (r = 0.69), while photoperiod was positively related to days to flowering or total leaf number (r = 0.89). Additionally, a positive nonlinear relationship between maize LAR and plant growth rate was found. Present findings provide important parameter values for calibration and optimization of maize crop models in the United States Corn Belt, as well as new insights to enhance mechanisms in crop models