Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants
Nadine Taha (Siegen)
Locating Media Practices of Inventing in Industrial Research Laboratories
At the end of the nineteenth century, industry sought the support of organized research for the first time. The result was the establishment of the industrial research laboratory in the science- and technology-based industries. During this time, many industrial laboratories were created: in 1876 Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park, in 1881 the laboratory of the American Bell Telephone Company, in 1890 Eastman Kodak and the chemical producers DuPont de Nemours, in 1896 General Electric.
Not only are labs a birthplace of media like radio, telephone an camera, they are at the same time place of origin of a lot of other media techniques. These media proved to be necessary for the work process in industrial laboratories. The French sociologist of science and technology Bruno Latour gives evidence for the richness of these new media techniques in industrial research laboratories. Before natural objects can be transformed into industrial resources, they must be arranged in proper order and visualized. This occurs within translation processes, for example chemicals must be described in numbers or in diagrams (Latour 2006, 518).
My dissertation intends to locate media inventions in the industrial research laboratories and analyses practices of media use from a Science and Technology Studies perspective. Science and Technology Studies is a theoretical and methodological approach that elucidates the knowledge and technology production in a laboratorial context. This framework offers the opportunity to determine dynamics of the interaction between technical artifacts, media techniques and human actors (Knorr-Cetina 1984; Latour/Woolgar 1979). At the microscopic level of historical case studies it is possible to illuminate the relationship between (technical and human) actors. The reconstruction of lab practices and actions in distinct steps allows to draw an innovative picture of the Media in Action.
Nadine Taha studied Media Planning, Development and Consulting at Siegen University. Her diploma thesis dealt with media infrastructures in Science and Technology Studies. Her Ph.D. project “The US-Industrial Research Laboratory as Place of Origin of New Technical Media” was started in the graduate school “Locating Media/Situierte Medien” in 2011.
taha@locatingmedia.uni-siegen.de
Recent Publications
2012: “Patent in Action: Das US-amerikanische Patent aus Perspektive der Science and Technology Studies,” in: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 6, 36–47.
2013: Navigationen 12/2, Vom Feld zum Labor und zurück, ed. with Raphaela Knipp and Johannes Paßmann (in preparation).