The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Confronting the challenges of participatory cultures (media education for the 21st century)

The End of History and the Last Man

Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society

Many teens today who use the Internet are actively involved in participatory cultures -- joining online communities (Facebook, message boards, game clans), producing creative work in new forms (digital sampling, modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction), working in teams to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (as in Wikipedia), and shaping the flow of media (as in blogging or podcasting). A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these activities, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, development of skills useful in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Some argue that young people pick up these key skills and competencies on their own by interacting with popular culture; but the problems of unequal access, lack of media transparency, and the breakdown of traditional forms of socialization and professional training suggest a role for policy and pedagogical intervention.This report aims to shift the conversation about the "digital divide" from questions about access to technology to questions about access to opportunities for involvement in participatory culture and how to provide all young people with the chance to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed. Fostering these skills, the authors argue, requires a systemic approach to media education; schools, afterschool programs, and parents all have distinctive roles to play.The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning

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Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

Paper Knowledge is a remarkable book about the mundane: the library card, the promissory note, the movie ticket, the PDF (Portable Document Format) It is a media history of the document Drawing examples from the 1870s, the 1930s, the 1960s, and today, Lisa Gitelman thinks across the media that the document form has come to inhabit over the last 150 years, including letterpress printing, typing and carbon paper, mimeograph, microfilm, offset printing, photocopying, and scanning Whether examining late nineteenth century commercial, or "job" printing, or the Xerox machine and the role of reproduction in our understanding of the document, Gitelman reveals a keen eye for vernacular uses of technology She tells nuanced, anecdote-filled stories of the waning of old technologies and the emergence of new Along the way, she discusses documentary matters such as the relation between twentieth-century technological innovation and the management of paper, and the interdependence of computer programming and documentation Paper Knowledge is destined to set a new agenda for media studies

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents

Reminding us that all media were once new, this book challenges the notion that to study new media is to study exclusively today's new media. Examining a variety of media in their historic contexts, it explores those moments of transition when new media were not yet fully defined and their significance was still in flux. Examples range from familiar devices such as the telephone and phonograph to unfamiliar curiosities such as the physiognotrace and the zograscope. Moving beyond the story of technological innovation, the book considers emergent media as sites of ongoing cultural exchange. It considers how habits and structures of communication can frame a collective sense of public and private and how they inform our apprehensions of the "real." By recovering different (and past) senses of media in transition, New Media, 1740-1915 promises to deepen our historical understanding of all media and thus to sharpen our critical awareness of how they acquire their meaning and power. ContributorsWendy Bellion, Erin C. Blake, Patricia Crain, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Lisa Gitelman, Geoffrey B. Pingree, Gregory Radick, Laura Burd Schiavo, Katherine Stubbs, Diane Zimmerman Umble, Paul Young.

New Media, 1740-1915

We live in the era of Big Data, with storage and transmission capacity measured not just in terabytes but in petabytes (where peta - denotes a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion) Data collection is constant and even insidious, with every click and every "like" stored somewhere for something This book reminds us that data is anything but "raw," that we shouldn't think of data as a natural resource but as a cultural one that needs to be generated, protected, and interpreted The book's essays describe eight episodes in the history of data from the predigital to the digital Together they address such issues as the ways that different kinds of data and different domains of inquiry are mutually defining; how data are variously "cooked" in the processes of their collection and use; and conflicts over what can -- or can't -- be "reduced" to data Contributors discuss the intellectual history of data as a concept; describe early financial modeling and some unusual sources for stronomical data; discover the prehistory of the database in newspaper clippings and index cards; and consider contemporary "dataveillance" of our online habits as well as the complexity of scientific data curation Essay authors: Geoffrey C Bowker, Kevin R Brine, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Lisa Gitelman, Steven J Jackson, Virginia Jackson, Markus Krajewski, Mary Poovey, Rita Raley, David Ribes, Daniel Rosenberg, Matthew Stanley, Travis D Williams

Data before the Fact

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction, Behind the Data Archive, Routines and Ritual: “We Go Out on Wednesdays”, Shifting Field Sites: Environment, Humans and Infrastructure over Time, Cascading Rituals: From Field to Lab, Conclusion, Acknowledgments

Data Bite Man: The Work of Sustaining a Long-Term Study

In the last few years, the AHR has published four “Conversations,” each on a subject of interest to a wide range of historians: “On Transnational History” (2006), “Religious Identities and Violence” (2007), “Environmental Historians and Environmental Crisis” (2008), and “Historians and the Study of Material Culture” (2009). For each the process has been the same: the Editor convenes a group of scholars with an interest in the topic, who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conversation, which is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing in the December issue. The goal has been to provide readers with a wide-ranging consideration of an important topic at a high level of expertise, in which the participants are recruited across several fields and periods. It is the sort of publishing project that this journal is uniquely positioned to undertake.

Lisa Gitelman

Papers

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents

New Media, 1740-1915

Data before the Fact

Data Bite Man: The Work of Sustaining a Long-Term Study

AHR Conversation: Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information