Project Details
Projekt
GRK 1020: Media of History - History of Media
Subject Area
Literary Studies
Term
from 2005 to 2013
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 373035
In the last decades, the relation between history and media has been discussed from different points of view. There are two main aspects: first of all, media reports of the last few years have triggered debates about how the media stage and enact historical events; secondly, recent theories of media and of history have posed the question of how various media encode historical situations and processes. In any case, the issue is not only one of the interdependence between event and symbolic structure, but, more fundamentally, it concerns the conditions within media that determine the design of what is perceived and experienced as history .
The Research Training Group uses these lines of thought as points of departure, attempting to ascertain the manner in which the question of a history of media intersects the question of media of history . The double focus is reflected in the concrete material and contexts the Research Training Group is analysing: on the one hand, the nineteenth century s shift in media development, in the course of which mass media, new media technologies of communication, and media of visualisation supplement; on the other hand, the emergence of modern historical concepts which as of the late eighteenth century centered on the persisting tension between event and process.
The crossing over of media and history, such as it took place from the eighteenth century onward, will be addressed on different levels. Whereas mass media determine how to select the significance of various events, the various media of representation and their parameters (writing and visualisation, analogue and digital media) determine the very modes of representation, thus establishing a specific historical (dis-)continuity. Communication media (ranging from telegraphy to the internet) produce a specific quality of historical data, but at the same time, historiography itself is subject to a certain infrastructure of media. This infrastructure in turn supplies techniques for storage in the form of archives, libraries, collections, and museums. These questions do not only concern the function of media in the formation of historical knowledge. Rather, they cast a revealing light on the efficacy of media within different cultures. All of this can be seen to frame the general question of how a history of media as such is possible - in other words, in what way media and media techniques provide the conditions of their own historiography.
The Research Training Group uses these lines of thought as points of departure, attempting to ascertain the manner in which the question of a history of media intersects the question of media of history . The double focus is reflected in the concrete material and contexts the Research Training Group is analysing: on the one hand, the nineteenth century s shift in media development, in the course of which mass media, new media technologies of communication, and media of visualisation supplement; on the other hand, the emergence of modern historical concepts which as of the late eighteenth century centered on the persisting tension between event and process.
The crossing over of media and history, such as it took place from the eighteenth century onward, will be addressed on different levels. Whereas mass media determine how to select the significance of various events, the various media of representation and their parameters (writing and visualisation, analogue and digital media) determine the very modes of representation, thus establishing a specific historical (dis-)continuity. Communication media (ranging from telegraphy to the internet) produce a specific quality of historical data, but at the same time, historiography itself is subject to a certain infrastructure of media. This infrastructure in turn supplies techniques for storage in the form of archives, libraries, collections, and museums. These questions do not only concern the function of media in the formation of historical knowledge. Rather, they cast a revealing light on the efficacy of media within different cultures. All of this can be seen to frame the general question of how a history of media as such is possible - in other words, in what way media and media techniques provide the conditions of their own historiography.
DFG Programme
Research Training Groups
Applicant Institution
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Participating Institution
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena; Universität Erfurt
Participating Researchers
Professor Dr. Lorenz Engell; Professor Dr. Alf Lüdtke (†); Professor Dr. Karl Sierek; Professor Dr. Wolfgang Struck; Professorin Dr. Cornelia Vismann (†)
Spokespersons
Professor Dr. Friedrich Balke, from 1/2005 until 9/2012; Professorin Dr. Bettine Menke
