2.2 Media-historiographic Methods 

Currently the problem of transferring media-ethnographic tasks to tasks of media historiography has not yet been dealt with systematically. A future interdisciplinary discussion that could also be moderated by the Research Training Group deserves to be contemplated. The following three developments should be considered in this context:

(a)  Discussing the term "historical ethnography" (within the current scope of European ethnology).

(b)  Current developments in media studies of the "archeology of media" within the concept of "cultural techniques."

(c)  Developments of media history within historiography.

Currently, the most extensive germanophone discussion of transferring ethnographic methods to methods of historiography is taking place in European ethnology, after it had been discussed for decades within the scope of "historical anthropology" (Habermas/Minkmar 1992; Medick 1989). This is probably due to the fact that the discipline of European ethnology has felt called upon to create a continuity between historical and ethnographic objects of research and methods since its inception, including the analysis of popular media (Habermas/Minkmar, 1992; Medick, 1989). For several reasons this discussion is relevant for developing a "historical ethnography of media" not only because European ethnology has repeatedly analyzed locative and situational media practices (Warneken, 2006; Maase, 1997) since its establishment, but because the discussion of historical ethnography by now has found its way into media history (Ege, 2007; Steinacker, 2010). While Maase (2001) has asked the question "Das Archiv als Feld?" (The archive as field?) and while Fenske (2006) has answered it by calling it a "Cultural-anthropological Practice" on the basis of the analogy between fieldwork and archival research, the current views of historical ethnography highlight the joint task of "historical ethnographic practice theory" (Wietschorke 2010: 209). Yet another central question is the media dependent reconstruction of past practices that in itself needs to impart practice-theoretical knowledge of the transmitted media and their historical interpretation. Regarding this, Sven Steinacker (2010: 74) refers to ethnomethodological "studies of work" as models for determining the relationship between historical sources (and especially "records") and the interpretable practices realized and documented in them. It is through records and documents that past practices can be interpreted since creating records had always been an activity that included many other practices that now may continue to be interpreted. "Then, however, no longer the realities constructed in the records are central; now the written artifacts themselves will become the objects of research. In contrast to the use of texts as containers of information for a reconstruction of a reality that 'lies at their basis' […] the analysis of the structural patterns and principles of the production and use of these documents is now the predominant activity" (Steinacker 2010: 75). This concept relates to the praxeological "analysis of documents and records" as it has been developed first in the "auxiliary historical studies," but which in the meantime can be regarded as an independent field of locative and situational media studies (Wolff 2000, 1995).

In this manner, the concept of a historical ethnography has been established at the interfaces of historical ethnology, European ethnology, and historiography; in German media studies this has been regarded as a truism already for several years. Its successful theoretical foundation can for example be recognized at the basis of the Research Training Group "Historiographies of Mediality" in Weimar. It is the recognition that the mediality of historical knowledge and historicizing past and current media have to be related to each other by way of a shared creation of categories. However, the question has to be asked conversely in what practice-theoretical way this idea has been represented in German media studies and its history of media. Here as well one can observe a shift. The previous archeology of media in media studies has argued with the concept of an "a priori of media" that put media and in particular its apparatuses and technical units in the first place of a historical deduction; at its other end then at least appeared the popular and everyday usages as the deducted elements. This type of media history implicitly or explicitly bestowed a privilege on a certain dimension of media practices, namely the development of successfully consolidated media-technological inventions. This type of historical representation, however, does not stand up to the international standards of research in the science and technology studies. There, since social constructivism in the 1980s, David Bloor's symmetry principle has gained acceptance; it demands describing failed and successful social and technological developments with the same categories without privileging the successfully consolidated developments in a history of progress. Nevertheless, the media archaeological research in the last years has been increasingly characterized by a multiform discussion on the concept of cultural techniques (Engell/Siegert 2010), and the standardizing of an a priori of media in this way pales behind a pooling of different techniques with a posteriori aims (Schüttpelz. 2006). As one can see in comparing it to international science and technology studies (Haigh, 2011) the practice-theoretical studies of the archaeology of media and of the germanophone history of media continue to be capable of development: Even though in the archaeology of media some earlier practice-theoretical keywords are made fruitful for the history of media by now—the "tacit knowledge" by Michel Polanyi (1958) for example—and even though a whole series of excellent locative and situational studies have been published (see Hoof, 2009), yet, unlike in the international science and technology studies, an equally techno- and socio-historical debate is lacking (as, by the way, is a techno- and socio-theoretical one) whose focus would lie in relating locative and situational media practices consistently to the categorization of their "communities of practice" (Wenger 1998).

In all probability this lack will be increasingly felt in the future the more historiography succeeds in developing a history of media that is able to relate the "Mediality of History and the Historicity of Media" to each other in the above mentioned realization (Crivellari et al., 2004). The history of media in historiography has been characterized by instrumental notions for a long time. In the case of political history, media first of all were highlighted as mediating instances, for example of stabilizing power or of processes of identities or nations. In social history, media were seen less as carriers of information than as elements of social coherence or as structures. This meant that both individual media (Braive, 1966; Sklar, 1975; Winkler, 1993) and their whole range from the book to the internet (Briggs/Burke, 2009) were raised to the status of research objects in all their interpenetration. The biggest change with regard to the historiographic approach to media came with the development of a new kind of cultural history, the cultural turn of the 1980s; and since the 1990s the upheaval in cultural studies is accompanied by a spatial turn that acts as a stimulus to analyze concrete realms of knowledge like the museum or spaces of entertainment like the fair or the amusement park and their media (Schwarz, 2011a, 2011b). With this double turn, the discipline itself has opened up more towards cultural studies, in particular due to the methodological developments of historical anthropology and micro-history whose potentials have been already made fertile for the development of media history (Dommann, 2008, 2010). Nevertheless they have not yet been exhausted and have so far remained on the fringes of the science and technology studies in international research (Johns, 1998; Jacob, 2007: 507-777).