“Deep Time of Media Infrastructure” In Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, Eds., Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (University of Illinois Press, 2015)
Deep Time of Media Infrastructure

“Deep Time of Media Infrastructure” In Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, Eds., Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (University of Illinois Press, 2015)
This semester I’m teaching Urban Media Archaeology for the fourth — and probably final — time (the embedded link takes you to our class website). UMA has been one of the most cohesive, stimulating, boundary-pushing, rewarding — and challenging and time-intensive — courses I’ve ever taught. I’m particularly grateful that I’ve been able to work with the spectacular Rory Solomon for all four years. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him, and he’s become a fabulous — and, I hope, long-lasting — friend.
We’ll be kicking off the semester once again with a “walking tour of the Internet” with Tubes author Andrew Blum (I wrote about this annual ritual in my recent “Infrastructural Tourism” article). Then, as in past semesters, we’ll talk about media archaeology, urban archaeology, and digital humanities. This year I’m pleased to be able to use excerpts from Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp’s 2012 Digital_Humanities book from MIT Press. Then in October we’ll be taking part in a media archaeology panel discussion, organized by my friend and colleague Kate Eichhorn; she’s invited Jussi Parikka, Lisa Gitelman, and me to participate.
We’ll also spend a couple weeks talking about critical cartography. Then we’ll work with the students to develop spatial data models; Rory and I have evolved our teaching tools and techniques for this lesson — which is always a challenge — over the years, and we have tentative plans to co-author an article on data-modeling in the humanities to reflect what we‘ve learned about the students’ learning. After modeling our data, we’ll have our mid-semester Pecha Kucha — with guest critics Anne Balsamo, Joseph Heathcott, and Jane Pirone — and we’ll do some paper prototyping.
In the final third of the semester, as the students are concretizing their “cartographic arguments,” another good friend and colleague, Nicole Starosielski, will join us from NYU to talk about her own process of developing a geographic/cartographic argument about undersea cables for her forthcoming book and interactive project, Surfacing. After that, we’ll close out the semester with a few tech workshops and one-on-one consultations, followed by final presentations.
Here’s to a fun and productive final semester of UMA!
As I mentioned in my previous post, I want to do a better job of identifying what useful skills students can develop in my classes. And by “useful” I don’t mean simply “marketable” — but that is indeed part of it. I think even “critical” and “creative” skills, like “critical thinking” and “the ability to develop a solid literature review,” can be translated into competencies that a hiring director would valorize.
So here are the “applicable critical skills” and “practical skills” that students can develop in my fall classes, Archives, Libraries + Databases and Urban Media Archaeology.
Why learn about archives and libraries and databases if you have no interest in being a librarian or archivist or database manager?Â
What useful skills do we develop in Archives, Libraries + Databases? Well, this is a seminar, so most of our labor involves reading and discussing and writing (although students do have the option of completing a creative project for their final). But the things we read and talk about do have plenty of potential applications in the “real world”; here’s how we might translate those applications into contemporary resume-language. We’ll learn to…
Now, what about Urban Media Archaeology? Why learn about mapping and urban history and infrastructure — three of our central themes in the course?
What practical skills do we develop in Urban Media Archaeology?
I hope it’s apparent that these skills are applicable in a wide variety of fields and scenarios.
At the 2012 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, I joined Lisa Parks from UC Santa Barbara, Nicole Starosielski from Miami University, and Jonathan Sterne from McGill — all fabulous and inspiring — on the “Signal Traffic” panel, which focused on media infrastructure. You can find my text and slides here.