The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures Since 1832, by Sebastian Giessmann
The notion of a “network” became one of academia’s most overused and undertheorized constructions in the wake of 1980s poststructuralism, 1990s “dotcom” companies, and “web 2.0” in the 2000s. Or, as author Sebastian Giessmann phrases it in his newly translated book, The Connectivity of Things, “The ideal properties attributed to the net and the rhizome in post-structuralist philosophy are scarcely matched by real objects so far known to us”.
Reviewed by James A Hodges
Geopolitics of Digital Heritage by Natalia Grincheva and Elizabeth Stainforth
This book by Natalia Grincheva and Elizabeth Stainforth explores “how culture, history and memory are organized through digital heritage aggregators in ways that exert power, both within the confines of the nation-state and crucially, beyond it”. In the process, it also contributes to the research on digital geopolitics and geocultural power of cultural heritage.
Reviewed by Aifang Ma
Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory by Ian Milligan
Ian Milligan’s Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory opens with a contrast: In early 1996, the web was in a digital dark age; but by 2001, the web could remember, abundantly. But who, we might ask, was doing the remembering? Milligan shows how early web archiving at the turn of the millennium was characterized by both urgency and experimentation from preservation practitioners and internet technologists facing an impending digital dark age.
Reviewed by Amelia Acker
Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past by Maria R. Montalvo
Through analysis of more than eighteen thousand legal records produced in antebellum New Orleans courts, Maria R. Montalvo exposes how enslavers leveraged their control of official documents to further their slave trade and economic interests in her book Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past. The tragic fact of this time, as Montalvo illustrates throughout, is that the history of the enslaved population is “largely dependent on an archive created by enslavers”.
Reviewed by Dana Ellwood
Mainstreaming and Game Journalism by David B. Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman
In Mainstreaming and Game Journalism, David B. Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman provide a novel analysis of the game journalism sector, emphasizing its precarious and marginal status in relation to other forms of journalism and media. Through the concept of “mainstreaming,” Nieborg and Foxman’s book provides an incisive and important analysis, arguing that while there is a widespread adoption of games by the public and coverage of games by many journalists, this ubiquity does not mean that games and game journalism are understood to be “mainstream” in the same way that film and television are.
Reviewed by Ryan Stanton
The Switch: An Off and On History of Digital Humans by Jason Puskar
As one might expect from a book subtitled “an off and on history of digital humans,” Jason Puskar’s The Switch looks at a wide range of objects people have used to turn things on and off. These include keys that control pianos, typewriters, adding machines, and computer keyboards.
Reviewed by Peggy Kidwell