Films in the Archive: Hollywood in Detroit

The Prelinger Archives, a collection of over 60,000 so-called ephemeral films, approximately 6,500 of which are freely available online for viewing and public download, is an amazing resource for research and teaching in the history of technology. [superscript 1] Collector, archivist, writer, and filmmaker Rick Prelinger began assembling his collection in the early 1980s. Over the next decades, his collection of 35 mm and 16 mm films grew into the tens of thousands. Films designed as educational, industrial, vocational, or advertising (overlapping categories often subsumed under the term sponsored), along with amateur and 8 mm home movies, were gathered from far and wide. [superscript 2] Films from any of these genres are often referred to as ephemeral, a term applied based on the idea that such a film’s period usefulness, in the sense of actual time being shown for the purpose for which it was created, is limited. The term’s appropriateness becomes questionable once the lifespan of these films has been extended through the development of new contexts in which they are useful (for example, for scholarly research or nostalgic film series programming). [superscript 3

Technologist-Historian: Data Visualization Meets the Archive

NukeMap is an interactive data-visualization website that allows visitors to detonate virtual nuclear bombs on global targets of their choice.1 It is the creation of Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and technology who launched the site in early 2012. In NukeMap, the visitor selects a type of nuclear device, defining its size, or chooses from a menu of predefined options that model the effects that an actual historical bomb would have on a present-day target. Interactive-display options allow visitors to explore map layers and datasets such as blast radius, fallout pattern, and number of casualties. Hyperlinks connect to additional historical resources. He or she may, for example, see how much damage “Little Boy,” the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, would do if dropped on modern Mumbai, or “Gadget,” the bomb detonated over the New Mexican desert in the Trinity test, would do if dropped on Manhattan today

Stitching time: artisanal collaboration and slow fashion in post-disaster Haiti

The promotion of the textile and garment industries as a development strategy following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and a US-backed return to garment assembly lines has prompted an interrogation of some of the local impacts of transnational manufacturing practices in this context. This essay seeks to evaluate alternative fashion practices and social enterprises in Haiti that are currently challenging and disassembling the contemporary forms of slavery predominant in offshore low-wage garment manufacturing. These slower “ethical fashion” cooperatives integrate traditional Haitian skills and cultural konesans (knowledge) with international design languages and market savoir-faire to produce unique handcrafted pieces for the global fashion market. Yet, as this paper argues, these collaborations reveal ongoing neo-colonial inequalities that side-line Haitian agency. Their uneven modes of production and marketing strategies often involve short-term interventions by Western fashion designers that undermine Haitian expertise. This examination of artisan “development” therefore seeks to situate these enterprises in a longer history of sustainability in Haiti, and considers how stitching cloth in response to disaster can retrace the stories of loss and survival of communities and mediate cultural knowledge

A Global History of Secondhand Clothing

Clothing, almost by definition, is a medium of transmission within a spreadable media ecology. It is both the means and the site for the storage and spread of information. Clothes are made to be carried by the human body (as in the French porter and the Haitian Creole pote). Textile skins were, from their origins, portable artifacts and temporary prostheses, shaped by the demands of a mobile body and inscribed with markers of that body’s history. The demands on clothing have always been high—armor (protection against shame, enemies, and the elements) and aesthetics, comfort and durability. Clothing is portable, proximate to the human body, and eminently changeable. Clothes remain artifacts in continual flux. They convey messages to the world, and they also provide the raw material for subversion of precisely these messages

Digital Histories of Disasters: History of Technology through Social Media

On 11 March 2011, a giant earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Japan triggered the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Failure of the plant’s heating and cooling system and an inability to properly stabilize the reactors post-meltdown led to the displacement of over 150,000 people. In its wake, three historians and sociologists of science and technology with ties to Asia came together to attempt to use social media as a way to create a community in response to the disaster and its aftermath. Together Honghong Tinn and Tyson Vaughan, along with Lisa Onaga, set out to make an online collective bibliography and repository for information and historical context for events surrounding the disaster. The goal was to provide a forum for educators to draw on a range of what might otherwise be overlooked sources. Teach311.org, the site they launched in April 2011, facilitates a collaboratively written digital annotated bibliography focused on sociohistorical dimensions of disasters. Along with providing access to a particular online resource, contributors summarize it or describe its relevance to understanding the 3.11 disaster or the sociotechnical historical study of disasters more generally. Thus an international network of academics, students, and translators, among others, produce content in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Bahasa Indonesia, and English. Together they continue to ask the seemingly simple question of “Why did the disaster happen?

The Documentary Impulse

This article has two interconnected goals. It is, first of all, a review of the film The Land Beneath Our Feet, an exemplary documentary that combines the history of technology, science and technology studies, and environmental history in its exploration of the social, cultural, and natural consequences of the rubber industry’s expansion in Liberia. The essay’s larger purpose, however, is to explore the powerful role documentary film-making practices have to play in the development of new approaches in the history of technology. Here, an interview with historian and film co-director Gregg Mitman provides the framework for an expansive conversation about both the “documentary impulse” that he explores in his film and related written works, and also the growing role of audiovisual practice in scholarly work