Digital History

For advice on thinking about digital projects and planning them before building a website, you might want to browse through Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and, Presenting the Past on the Web, by Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig.

Need some inspiration? Look at a list of websites built in Omeka.net.

Assignment #1

What is a city? What are some of the frameworks for considering and theorizing the mediated city? These are the questions that permeate this week's readings. In "What is a City?" Lewis Mumford views the city as a social institution and describes it thusly: "The city in its complete sense, then is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity." Mumford's focus is not on "the built environment" as such but rather the city as a theater in which "man's more purposive activities are focused and work out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations." In "Visions of a New Reality" Frederic Stout chronicles emergence of a new visual culture and observes that "each historical era creates characteristic forms of expression and explanatory discourse that reflect, indeed construct, the social reality of the period." Stout examines the role of photography in creating and capturing the social reality of urban life in a mediated city. Eric Gordon in his Introduction to The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google, outlines his concept of possessive spectatorship, "a way of looking that incorporates immediate experience with the desire for subsequent possession" of the traces of that experience. Gordon is chiefly concerned with "how the dominant understandings of technologies, shaped through metaphors ... collide with the consumptive practices of spectators" and how "possessive spectatorship ... structured by architectural, urbanistic, and technological innovations, has influenced the shape of the American Concept-city." Georg Simmel outlines a more sociological-psychological framework in this "Metropolis and Mental Life." Simmel examines the influence of the environmental stimuli on the development of what he calls "mental life," namely the predominance of intellectuality and logic, the protective mechanism called reserve, the calculability of the money economy and the appearance of the characteristic blasé attitude as indicative of metropolitan influences. Michel de Certeau takes a more literary approach to theorizing cities. He views cities as texts, composed of "the tallest letters in the world", described by walkers who commit "speech acts" in a "rhetoric of walking", and "whose bodies follow the ... urban text they write without being able to read it." De Certeau draws upon Baudelaire's notion of the flâneur, the person who walks the city to understand the city and is both part of the crowd and simultaneously apart from it.

Notes on Frederic Stout "Visions of a New Reality"

Frederic Stout, “Visions of a New Reality: The City and the Emergence of Modern
Visual Culture,” (first published in 1999), The City Reader, (Fifth Edition) Richard T.
LeGates and Frederic Stout, eds., (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 150-
153.

In "Visions of a New Reality" Frederic Stout chronicles emergence of a new visual culture, one fostered by and focused on the city. Drawing from Marx, Stout begins with the observation that "each historical era creates characteristic forms of expression and explanatory discourse that reflect, indeed construct, the social reality of the period." Focusing mainly on the realm of visual arts, Stout begins his story with the "dramatic and rapidly changing social realities" embedded within the cities of the Industrial Revolution. It was during this turbulent period that new "forms of expression and modes of discourse arose" and a "whole new kind of visual culture emerged, rooted in the observation of the new urban reality, both social and physical."

Not surprisingly this new visual culture traces its beginnings to the popular newspapers of the day. Stout reviews the early development of illustrated journalism and its role in meeting "the growing demand for information and entertainment on the part of a marginally literate but fully enfranchised working class and petit bourgeoisie." While establishing a characteristic style of static composite picture, it was soon supplanted by a new technology of representation - photography. Stout argues that it was this technological turn which established the importance of the social reality of urban life to the new visual culture. Photography "perfectly exemplified the spirit of the modern age" - ubiquitous, immediate, democratic and kinetic. While all aspects of the human subject found their way into the frame, it was the urban subjects - "the inescapable social and physical reality of the modern city" that took prominence. From the spectacles of disaster, to the frenetic city sketches, to the monumental architecture, to the plight of human suffering and injustice, photography embraced and uplifted them all as subject; a subject in which the viewer often recognized herself and her own experiences. As living and working conditions deteriorated Through the Great Depression photographers gradually turned to "the intersection of art and social protest."

While photography did not complete the project of understanding cities visually, it did set the stage for future developments. Soon it was connected to narrative, particularly to the "urban narrative" and with the new kinetic visual representation morphed into cinema. But still, in "the modern city, it is the image ... that is paramount both as spectacle and revelation."

Notes on Lewis Mumford's "What is a City?"

Lewis Mumford, “What is a City,” (first published in Architectural Record, 1937) The City Reader, (Fifth Edition) Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, eds., (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 91-95.

In "What is a City?" Lewis Mumford, one of the most preeminent urban historians descries what he sees as the chief handicap to modern city planning, the failure to understand and embrace the social function of the city. Rather than view the city as a "purely physical fact" Mumford suggests a broader view and asks "what is the city as a social institution?" and offers the following answer; "The city in its complete sense, then is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity." Mumford's focus is not on "the built environment" as such but rather the city as locus of social networks and a theater in which "man's more purposive activities are focused and work out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations." While the nature of the built environment no doubt influence this social drama, Mumford sees its role as primarily that of a well designed stage set, to facilitate and intensify the performance of the actors upon it. Mumford asserts that the quintessential character of the city is to "create drama," for although all of the necessary physical structures of cities may exist elsewhere, namely in the suburbs, it is this "opportunity for social disharmony and conflict" that only urban densities and proximities provide. A city may be viewed according to Mumford as "a special framework directed toward the creation of differentiated opportunities for a common life and a significant social drama."

Mumford argues that it is this consideration that ultimately should determine such limiting factors as size, density, area and layout of a city, rather than topographical or technological concerns. Since it is most important to express "size as a function of the social relationships to be served" it is natural that Mumford should advocate for small scale clusters of communities "adequately spaced and bounded" known as the "polynucleated city" as opposed to the monopolistic, hypertrophied and aggrandizing "mononucleated city" with its single focal point. Dubbing it the Highwayless Town, Mumford sees an eventual trend toward this form of limited, decentralized and dissociated urban development through the effective zoning of functions in which "the various functional parts of the structure are isolated topographically as urban islands appropriately designed for their specific use." It is through this deliberate design and articulation that the necessary social concentration for social drama may be best achieved.

HOC UGA Sep 2011

I tried to select readings that speak to the importance of place in shaping the ways that ideas associated with economic liberalization have been packaged, sold, legitimated, implemented, appropriated, etc. As terms like neoliberalism and globalization--or the ways that they have been deployed--tend to inscribe an aura of inevitability on the processes they denote, I'm hoping that these selections will help us to think about the contingent paths by which different countries and regions arrived at neoliberalism and the different forms that modern capitalism has taken in these places.

Readings:

1) Nancy MacLean, "Southern Dominance in Borrowed Language: The Regional Origins of American Neoliberalism" (Ch. 2 in Jane Collins, Micaela di Leonardo, and Brett Williams, eds. New Landscapes of Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democracy in America, 2008)

2) James Ferguson, "De-moralizing Economies: African Socialism, Scientific Capitalism, and the Moral Politics of Structural Adjustment" (Ch. 3 from Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, 2006)

3) Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth, "The Paradox of Symbolic Imperialism: The Southern Cone as an Explosive Laboratory of Modernity" (Ch. 7 from The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States, 2002)

Notes on Micheal de Certeau's "Walking in the City"

Michel de Certeau. “Walking in the City” in The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

coincidentia oppositorum is a Latin phrase meaning coincidence of opposites. It is a neoplatonic term attributed to 15th century German polymath Nicholas of Cusa in his essay, De Docta Ignorantia (1440). Mircea Eliade, a 20th century historian of religion, used the term extensively in his essays about myth and ritual, describing the coincidentia oppositorum as "the mythical pattern". Psychiatrist Carl Jung, philosopher and Islamic Studies professor Henry Corbin as well as Jewish philosophers Gershom Scholem and Abraham Joshua Heschel also used the term. In alchemy, coincidentia oppositorum is a synonym for conjunction, the fifth process.

The term is also used in describing a revelation of the oneness of things previously believed to be different. Such insight into the unity of things is a kind of transcendence, and is found in various mystical traditions. The idea occurs in the traditions of Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism, in German mysticism, Taoism, Zen and Sufism, among others.

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Icarus/Daedalus

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Texturology (texture, Latin: features of a structure of something considered as a whole, caused by an arrangement of its components; and logos, Greek: knowledge, doctrine)

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"They walk-an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmiinner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban "text" they write without being able to read it." {like the character in Auster's "City of Glass" New York Trilogy}

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"Within this ensemble, I shall try to locate the practices that are foreign to the "geometrical" or "geographical" space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions."

"These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations ("ways of operating"), to "another spatiality" (an "anthropological," poetic and mythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city."

"Linking the city to the concept never makes them identical, but it plays on their progressive symbiosis: to plan a city is both to think the very plurality of the real and to make that way of thinking the plural effective; it is to know how to articulate it and be able to do it."

Rhetoric of Walking as "figures of speech"

"Synecdoche makes more dense: it amplifies the detail and miniaturizes the whole. Asyndeton cuts out: it undoes continuity and undercuts its plausibility."

Notes on Eric Gordon - "The Urban Spectator" Introduction

Eric Gordon, “Introduction,” The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2010), pp. 1-20.

"Can the city, as an entity, continue to matter when digital networks
enable public gathering without requiring the public to gather in physical
space? The answer to these questions is a resounding "yes." The modern
American city has never been bereft of these complications- from the handheld
camera at the end of the nineteenth century to the mobile phone at the
end of the twentieth, the city has always been a mediated construct."

"The city enters into the cultural imaginary as a hodgepodge of disconnected signifiers, often organized by the technologies that produce them."

"Communication technologies ... provide the spectator the unique opportunity to at once experience space and possess its traces."

possessive spectatorship -- "the spectatorship structured around the desire for possessing these traces ... a way of looking that incorporates immediate experience with the desire for subsequent possession."

"The American city grew up in parallel to the technologies that enabled its possession."

"I argue that emerging media practices transformed urban practices by naturalizing
the notion that individual spectators could not only see the Conceptcity
but also possess it. And most importantly, I argue that this spectatorship
altered the material shape of the city as urban plans were drafted to meet the
expectations of a spectator eager to take control of the city's assembly."

Urban Practices/Concept-city

The concept of possessive spectatorship places a decisive emphasis on visuality.

Visuality is fundamentally embodied.

The notion that visuality and its corresponding technologies might alter the
way one engages with the urban environment is not particularly new.

Kodak camera -- "keeps his senses alert for the picture possibilities about him"

Ever since the handheld camera prompted shifts in the framing of everyday
vision, the process of collecting those visions has been framed through metaphor.

[I am] concerned with how the dominant understandings of technologies, shaped through metaphors of one kind or another, collide with the consumptive practices of spectators. And ultimately how this collision serves to shape the city.

Tbe view from on high is a fiction or facsimile of the city, like those drafted by planners or cartographers, but it does not provide access to the practices that actually compose the city.

Urban practices, themselves devoid of vision, always operate within what
de Certeau calls the Concept-city, a space of total vision. Each of the people on
that street corner is blindly interacting with their immediate urban spaces
(despite their use of media devices), while their understanding of those spaces
is framed by the evolving Concept-city (enhanced by those same devices).
Whether directly mediated or not, each practice of the city is embedded within some articulation of the Concept-city.

"De Certeau aligns this phenomenon to Ferdinand de Saussure's characterization of langue and
parole-the overall logic of any language (langue) is implicit in each individual speech act (parole). All urban experiences, he argues, comprise both the phenomenological encounter (the blind, embodied practices of the street) and the overarching logic of the Concept-city (the complete picture)."

Note: The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll". Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it". Because of the term's usage and theorization by Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity.