Media Historiography (410-0-20)

Topic

Useful Media

Instructors

Scott Curtis

Meeting Info

Annie May Swift Hall 109: Thurs 3:00PM - 5:50PM

Overview of class

This seminar focuses on the choices, methods, and stakes of writing a history of moving images, taking as its starting point the field of useful media: scientific and popular science films, classroom and educational media, sponsored and industrial films, public-health and training videos. Useful media is an especially productive site for historiographic training because the conventional approaches and sources of film history (auteurs, close analysis, the familiar archives of trade and fan discourse) do not easily apply: authorship is collective or unknown, film style is less helpful than it appears, and the literature for any given media text is as varied as the motivations of its sponsors. Topics might include authorship and sponsorship; the use and re-use of footage across institutional contexts; the colonial and global circulation of instructional media; and the politics of the archive. Students will practice dealing with fragmented or non-extant sources, reading primary source material in unfamiliar disciplines, and analyzing the role of aesthetics and medium specificity in works whose primary goal is pedagogical or procedural. "Historiography" in our field often means one's critical orientation toward media history, but it also implies a set of methodological practices. This seminar will ask students to consider how each sense shapes the other.

Class Attributes

Graduate Students Only