By the time readers encounter academic history in the form of books and articles, all that tends to be left of an author’s direct experience with archives is pages of endnotes. Whether intentionally or not, archives have until recently been largely thought of as discrete collections of documents, perhaps not neutral but rarely considered to be historical actors. This book brings together top media scholars to rethink the role of the archive and historical record from the perspective of writing media history. Exploring the concept of the archive forces a reconsideration of what counts as historical evidence. In this analysis the archive becomes a concept that allows the authors to think about the acts of classifying, collecting, storing, and interpreting the sources used in historical research. The essays included in this volume, from Susan Douglas, Lisa Gitelman, John Nerone, Jeremy Packer, Paddy Scannell, Lynn Spigel, and Jonathan Sterne, focus on both the theoretical and practical ways in which the archive has affected how media is thought about as an object for historical analysis. This book was published as a special issue of The Communication Review.

In the popular imagination, archives are remote, largely obsolete institutions: either antiquated, inevitably dusty libraries or sinister repositories of personal secrets maintained by police states. Yet the archive is now a ubiquitous feature of digital life. Rather than being deleted, e-mails and other computer files are archived. Media software and cloud storage allow for the instantaneous cataloging and preservation of data, from music, photographs, and videos to personal information gathered by social media sites. In this digital landscape, the archival-oriented media theories of Wolfgang Ernst are particularly relevant. Digital Memory and the Archive, the first English-language collection of the German media theorist’s work, brings together essays that present Ernst’s controversial materialist approach to media theory and history. His insights are central to the emerging field of media archaeology, which uncovers the role of specific technologies and mechanisms, rather than content, in shaping contemporary culture and society. Ernst’s interrelated ideas on the archive, machine time and microtemporality, and the new regimes of memory offer a new perspective on both current digital culture and the infrastructure of media historical knowledge. For Ernst, different forms of media systems—from library catalogs to sound recordings—have influenced the content and understanding of the archive and other institutions of memory. At the same time, digital archiving has become a contested site that is highly resistant to curation, thus complicating the creation and preservation of cultural memory and history.

Comparative Media History is a unique thematic textbook which introduces students to the key ideas underpinning media development. It is an essential first step to a better understanding of both the media industry today and the way in which it evolved over time. The textbook compares developments and influences from a broad perspective, highlighting and contrasting different countries, industries and periods of history in order to encourage an understanding of cause and effect. In a style which is clear, accessible and provocative, Jane Chapman argues that most of the roots of today's media - even the globalizing impulse - lie in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The book emphasises continuity and certain decisive factors such as the social use of technology, the character of the institutions in which it is applied and the political approach of the specific countries involved. The comparative element to this book, both across countries and industries, will enable students to reflect on key issues in media studies, including those of diversity, form, method and choice, both past and present. It will become an essential text for any student of the media and its history. For more information about the book and the author, please see www.janechapman.co.uk

Mining the Media Archive gathers together an exciting collection of essays by writer and cultural theorist Dot Tuer. Ranging from monographs on new media artists to a history of Canada's most controversial artist-run centre, the CEAC, to testimonial writing on cultural politics and post-colonialism in Canada and Argentina, Tuer's writings address issues of global media and local remembrance through a unique blend of storytelling, archival research and cultural analysis.

A history of the political roots of the information age, by one of this country's most distinguished intellectuals, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine

"Television History, The Peabody Archive, and Cultural Memory is the product of a multiyear collaboration between the Peabody Awards program and over a dozen media scholars with the intent to uncover, explore, and analyze historical television programming contained in the Peabody Awards archives at the University of Georgia. It is an intentional effort to look both wider and deeper than the well-known canon of U.S. broadcast history that dominates popular memory of the relationship of television to American society. The Peabody Archive is especially suited to this project because it is an archive of programming produced and submitted not just by the big networks in New York or Los Angeles, but by stations and media producers across the nation and, more recently, around the world. This project asks, how might these programs change our understanding of television's past, and impact the ways we think about television's present and future? What new questions can we ask and what new approaches should we take as a result of seeing and experiencing this programming? The contributions in this volume offer a dramatic range of approaches for how scholars can productively engage the archive's media and physical holdings to examine and reconsider television history"--

An examination of how nonprofessional archivists, especially media fans, practice cultural preservation on the Internet and how “digital cultural memory” differs radically from print-era archiving. The task of archiving was once entrusted only to museums, libraries, and other institutions that acted as repositories of culture in material form. But with the rise of digital networked media, a multitude of self-designated archivists—fans, pirates, hackers—have become practitioners of cultural preservation on the Internet. These nonprofessional archivists have democratized cultural memory, building freely accessible online archives of whatever content they consider suitable for digital preservation. In Rogue Archives, Abigail De Kosnik examines the practice of archiving in the transition from print to digital media, looking in particular at Internet fan fiction archives. De Kosnik explains that media users today regard all of mass culture as an archive, from which they can redeploy content for their own creations. Hence, “remix culture” and fan fiction are core genres of digital cultural production. De Kosnik explores, among other things, the anticanonical archiving styles of Internet preservationists; the volunteer labor of online archiving; how fan archives serve women and queer users as cultural resources; archivists' efforts to attract racially and sexually diverse content; and how digital archives adhere to the logics of performance more than the logics of print. She also considers the similarities and differences among free culture, free software, and fan communities, and uses digital humanities tools to quantify and visualize the size, user base, and rate of growth of several online fan archives.