Converging Trades and New Technologies: The Emergence of Kanga Textiles on the Swahili Coast in the Late Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 253-286
Author(s):  
MacKenzie Moon Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Swahili Coast ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Dazzling the Multitude Original Media Spectacles

1990 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Marvin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
Point To Point

Anthropologists and literary theorists are fond of emphasizing the particularistic and dramatic dimensions of lived communication. The particularistic dimension of communication is constituted in whatever of its aspects have the most individually intimate meaning for us. The dramatic dimension is the shared emotional character of a communicated message, displayed and sometimes exaggerated for consumption by a public. Its dramatic appeal and excitement depend partly on the knowledge that others are also watching with interest. Such dimensions have little in common with abstractions about information and efficiency that characterize contemporary discussion about new communications technologies, but may be closer to the real standards by which we judge media and the social worlds they invade, survey, and create. Media, of course, are devices that mediate experience by re-presenting messages originally in a different mode. In the late nineteenth century, experts convinced of the power of new technologies to repackage human experience and to multiply it for many presentations labored to enhance the largest, most dramatically public of messages, and the smallest, most intimately personal ones, by applying new media technologies to a range of modes from private conversation to public spectacle, that special large-scale display event intended for performance before spectators. In the late nineteenth century, intimate communication at a distance was achieved, or at least approximated, by the fledgling telephone. The telephone of this era was not a democratic medium. Spectacles, by contrast, were easily accessible and enthusiastically relished by their nineteenth-century audiences. Their drama was frequently embellished by illuminated effects that inspired popular fantasies about message systems of the future, perhaps with giant beams of electric light projecting words and images on the clouds. Mass distribution of electric messages in this fashion was indeed one pole of the range of imaginative possibilities dreamt by our ancestors for twentieth-century communication. Equally absorbing was the fantasy of effortless point-to-point communication without wires, where no physical obstacle divided the sympathy of minds desiring mutual communion.

The Technical Transformation of the Late Nineteenth-Century Gas Industry

1987 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 967-980 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Technological Transformation ◽  
Gas Industry ◽  
Coal Gas ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Firm Model ◽  
The Cost

This article analyzes, with particular reference to Britain, the technological transformation in coal gas manufacture around 1900. The timing of the innovation seems to be explained by the nature of the technology itself, by Rosenberg's “technical complementarity.” The rate of diffusion is analyzed by means of an inter-firm model which points to the importance of technical interrelatedness and the need to scrap old plant and of wage costs, which encouraged some firms to hasten scrapping. Different countries chose between the range of new technologies available largely on the basis of compatibility with existing plant and the cost of raw materials.

Directors/Directing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Switzky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Theatrical Performances ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Electric Light

Although some official has organized the acting and scenery in theatrical performances since ancient Greece, the director only emerged as a significant creative figure in the late nineteenth century. Directors introduced innovative acting methods, modernized staging through new technologies such as electric light and mechanized scenery, proposed theories about the function of the theater in social and political life, and provided unified interpretations of complex plays. As the self-designated authors of productions, directors often competed with playwrights and actors for artistic control, a tension that continues to characterize the division of labor in theaters.

scholarly journals Dance and Interactivity

2004 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Birringer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Motion Capture ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
International Community ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Merce Cunningham ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Motion Studies

A growing number of practitioners in the international community of choreographers and performers has begun to experiment with computer-assisted work linking dance and new technologies. This hardly comes as a surprise, since dance-on-film and videodance had already attracted considerable attention, at least since the 1980s. Earlier experiments, such as the astonishing films by Maya Deren, take us back to the 1940s, and today's motion capture-based animations find their historical roots in late nineteenth century motion studies in chronophotography and early cinema (Muybridge, Marey, Méliès). Furthermore, dancemakers, researchers, and teachers have used film or video as a vital means of documenting or analyzing existing choreographies. Some scholars and software programmers published tools (LabanWriter, LifeForms) that attracted attention in the field of dance notation and preservation as well as among choreographers (e.g., Merce Cunningham) who wanted to utilize the computer for the invention and visualization of new movement possibilities.

scholarly journals Sociocultural Aspects of Technological Change: The Rise of the Swiss Electricity Supply Economy

1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gugerli
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Water Supply ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Electricity Supply ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Swiss Society ◽  
Social Shaping ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The ArgumentThe impressive growth of the Swiss electricity supply industry in the late nineteenth cestury has usually been explained by Switzerland's abundant waterpower resouces, its well-equipped financial markets, and the mechanical skills of its Swiss workers and engineers. This article does not aim to deny the importance of these factors. Rather it seeks to explain how they developed synergetic effects and how they were knit together. The argument is put forward in three steps: First, I show the importance of the new technology's discursive integration, arguing that the development of specialized electric discourse led to a social shaping of technology that was highly compatible with generalized cultural patterns of late nineteenth-century Swiss society. The expressive dispositions and instituted means of expression that constitiute the elextric discourse were constantly pursuing and achieving effective resonances in other discursive fields. This allowed for a solid integration of the electrotechnical discourse in late nineteenth-century Swiss society.Second, I argue that electrotechnology was modeled in such a way that it became coupled with existing technological (and scientific) practices, such as the national mapping endeavor, the urban gas and water supply, the sewer system, and the telegraphic networks. It is noteworthy that making electrotechnology compatible with other technological practices led not only to similar patterns in the design and management of both the old and the new technologies but also to operated with the existing water supply station.Using the example of the electrification of Zurich, I then, in a third step, combine the two elements – discursive accommodation and practical assimilation – to demonstrate their effects on the selection and construction of technology. The article's somewhat complex argumentative strategy allows for a differentiated interpretation of the phenomenon and shows the importance of taking into consideration the sociocultural dimension of economic growth that had its roots in the diffusion of a new technology

Contents of Western Sociology of Religion as a Science and Educational Discipline

2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Society ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document