Editor's Note: Is That a Thing? The Twitching Document and the Talking Object

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Notes

Leora Auslander et al., “AHR Conversations: Historians and the Study of Material Culture,” American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (December 2009): 1355.

“Peter Hennessy,” British Academy Review, February 2014, 38.

For an excellent example of photographs as revealing of news work, see Hanno Hardt and Bonnie Brennen, “Newswork, History, and Photographic Evidence: A Visual Analysis of a 1930s Newsroom,” in Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography, ed. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 11–35. Also see Joel Snyder, “Res Ipsa Loquitur,” in Things That Talk, ed. Lorraine J. Daston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 195–221, in which the author examines nineteenth-century understandings of photographs and, of particular interest, objections to the admissibility of photographs as evidence in American courts of law.

Carolyn Kitch demonstrated in a conference-panel session how much could be known about an individual reader, including education and socioeconomic status, by tracing the mailing label from an early twentieth-century women's magazine. Berkley Hudson et al., “How to Teach Students to Mine Media History Archives” (teaching panel presented to annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, St. Louis, MO, August 12, 2011).

Auslander et al., “AHR Conversations,” 1355.

A historiography of the field is not the aim of this essay, but it should be noted that material culture studies have always been part of certain disciplines—art, anthropology, and archaeology, for example—and numerous studies of material cultures circulated in the 1960s and 1970s. For examples of 1990s work, see the collection by David Kingery, ed., Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). As more specific examples, see these studies of, respectively, objects used for child-rearing and Victorian-era household goods: Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992); Kenneth Ames, Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn 2001): 2.

Philosophers Martin Heidegger and Immanuel Kant are closely associated with the concept of “thingness.”

Brown, “Thing Theory,” 4.

Ibid.

Auslander et al., “AHR Conversations,” 1359.

Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008), 139–212, in which Heidegger explained the notion of thingness. It may be fair to say that some people are not as enamored as are philosophers and historians with thingness. See “Artists Get £20k to ‘Grapple with the Concept of Thing-ness’: Taxpayer-Funded Projects Denounced as ‘Self-Indulgent’ Waste of Money,” (London) Daily Mail, June 7, 2014.

Daston, ed., Things That Talk, 12.

Lorraine Daston, ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 5.

Excerpt from a description of and call for papers related to “The Objects of Journalism,” a pre-conference at the 2013 meeting of the International Communication Association, http://objectsofjournalism.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/call-for-papers-the-objects-of-journalism-media-materiality-and-the-news.

See, for example, C. W. Anderson, Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013).

See, for example, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Garvey's scholarly base is English, yet her research often examines media artifacts, including advertising memorabilia and newspaper clippings. See also Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Paul Leonardi has addressed this topic as it relates to modern media. See Paul M. Leonardi, “Digital Materiality? How Artifacts without Matter, Matter,” First Monday 15, no. 6–7 (June 2010), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3036/2567.

For a possible model, see Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); see also Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

Auslander et al., “AHR Conversations,” 1357.