Preliminary Programme

Tue 13 April
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

Wed 14 April
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

Thu 15 April
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

Fri 16 April
    8.30
    10.45
    14.15
    16.30

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Tuesday 13 April 2010 8.30
K-1 CUL02 Media and Societies in Europe since the 17th Century
Room D13, Pauli
Network: Culture Chair: Joris van Eijnatten
Organizers: - Discussant: Joris van Eijnatten
Frank Bösch : Media, Politics and Society in the 19th Century
My paper will discuss how media interacted with the fundamental changes during the “Birth of the Modern World” (Bayly). The majority of the important studies of the 19th century, even the recent book of Jürgen Osterhammel (2009), did rarely integrate this question so far. Most of them mentioned the invention ... (Show more)
My paper will discuss how media interacted with the fundamental changes during the “Birth of the Modern World” (Bayly). The majority of the important studies of the 19th century, even the recent book of Jürgen Osterhammel (2009), did rarely integrate this question so far. Most of them mentioned the invention of the mass press, telegraphs or news agencies, but seldom incorporated the shifting patterns of communication more deeply. My paper will debate theoretic and methodical approaches to analyze this century with such an approach and tries to give exemplary results from research in this field (also from my own research connected with a forthcoming book on "Media and Societies in Modern History").

Therefore, I will exemplary ask how the changes of media, politics and societies were connected in Europe and in selected non-European countries. The paper will discuss transfers and similarities between different countries, which can be pointed out during certain fundamental breaks: for instance during the revolutions 1830 and 1848, the nation-building and the foundations of states, or the growing democratization. I will argue that several similar changes within different societies (like Britain, France, Germany or Japan) during the late 19th century can be understood as a result of astonishing similar changes within their media system. My argument is that new mass media based on telegraphic distribution did not only change the national and global perception of the world, but led to a different way of acting politically and socially, because the new media were seen as influential. However, this interaction between the development of media, politics and society was of course not a direct road to democratization, but supported changes, which were titled as the “modern world.” (Show less)

José de Kruif : Textmining Media Hypes of the Nineteenth Century
Since the advent of printing, pamphlets have been the most important medium for conveying national and international news. And pamphlets functioned as the primary medium for propaganda, political debate and public protest as well. From the seventeenth century on, some of these functions were adopted by a then new phenomenon: ... (Show more)
Since the advent of printing, pamphlets have been the most important medium for conveying national and international news. And pamphlets functioned as the primary medium for propaganda, political debate and public protest as well. From the seventeenth century on, some of these functions were adopted by a then new phenomenon: the periodical press. However, this transition progressed only slowly and the pamphlet therefore could maintain its primary role well into the second half of nineteenth century when finally statutory freedom of the press, abolishment of the taxes on newspapers and technical innovations caused the rise of the newspaper.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the transition from pamphlet to periodicals and newspapers accelerated. At the dawn of the twentieth century the periodicals had far outnumbered the pamphlets that from then on mainly functioned as the vehicle for collectives like pressure groups.

Up to now, pamphlets and newspapers have always been studied separately, as distinct genres. Therefore we have no information on how the transition from one medium to the other has taken place and how this may have affected the public debate. To give two examples: the question what happens to a pamphlet text when it is published in a newspaper and one or more editors had their say on its contents is not answered. And a lot of pamphlets were published anonymously, but newspaper articles are tied to the newspaper and therefore their origins are much easier to trace.
The project "The long life of the political pamphlet" pamphlets and newspaper texts from the same periods and on the same topics are researched to trace the effects of the transition on the content of these media.
For a number of national issues periods of media hypes in different periods are compared. In addition the inquiries into the national press are performed using another transition: the one from paper to electronic texts. Many textual sources will become available in an electronic form in the near future. This opens possibilities for usage of ICT tools like text mining to facilitate this kind of research.

Until the end of the nineteenth century media hypes can be traced by periods of a sudden rise in pamphlet production accompanied by a sudden change in the content of periodicals and newspapers. Pamphlets and articles in newspapers and periodicals regarding issues of public debate were compared mutually as regards such matters as the rhetorical devices employed such as preferred terminology, references to persons and institutions and evaluative arguments. The question was asked how remediation took place, that is: which rhetorical conventions were taken over by the newspapers and which were abolished?
The software used allows for further modelling as well thus allowing to research connections between contents and metadata like authorship, particular medium and last but not least 'was the document ever used by a historian as a source?" This method results in a much clearer image of how the media conveyed the messages.
An image that can complete and partly replace the current fragmented impressions we have of the nineteenth-century press culture. Not only will the knowledge we thus acquire on remediation be discussed, but the issue whether text mining is a suitable method for this kind of research will be addressed as well. (Show less)

Joop W. Koopmans : The importance of eighteenth century newsbooks in Western Europe
During the early modern period printed news not only dispersed via new media such as newspapers, pamphlets and news prints, but also via the so-called news books. In my paper, I will separate newsbooks from newspapers and define them as a specific medium, which was important for the storage of ... (Show more)
During the early modern period printed news not only dispersed via new media such as newspapers, pamphlets and news prints, but also via the so-called news books. In my paper, I will separate newsbooks from newspapers and define them as a specific medium, which was important for the storage of news, the collective memory. More or less educated people, such as politicians, diplomats and merchants bought newsbooks to collect them as reference works. In contrast with newspapers they were printed only a few times a year, e.g. on a monthly, quarterly or half-yearly base, so they could contain better news summaries and more reflection on the news than newspapers did.

So far, newsbooks have been studied only occasionally as a separate category in discussions about the rise of the public sphere (Jürgen Habermas, Peter Burke). I consider them as forgotten too much. My purpose is to (re-)integrate them in the early modern media landscape and the theoretical debates about the interaction between news and politics. Although I will concentrate on Dutch eighteenth century examples in my paper, I intend to compare them with counterparts in other European countries. (Show less)

Corey Ross : Media and Society in 20th-century Europe: Developments and Methodologies in Diachronic Perspective
This paper outlines the development of approaches to the expansion of the mass media in twentieth century Europe, focussing in particular on the numerous interrelations between the history of communications and the wider history of social and political change. It is specifically conceived as part of a diachronically comparative panel ... (Show more)
This paper outlines the development of approaches to the expansion of the mass media in twentieth century Europe, focussing in particular on the numerous interrelations between the history of communications and the wider history of social and political change. It is specifically conceived as part of a diachronically comparative panel on media and society since the 17th century (proposed by Prof. Frank Bösch), and is concerned above all with the methods and concepts that can best help historians and other social scientists to integrate and contextualize the history of communications within broader historical narratives.

The last two decades have witnessed an unmistakeable surge in interest in communications among historians. There have been numerous reasons for this, the most of important of which have been: first, the wave of research on the history of mass consumption; second, the wider turn towards cultural history, or the so-called ‘cultural extension’ of social and political history; and third the recognition of the immense (and rapidly evolving) influence of the mass media in contemporary society. All of these factors have encouraged an intense engagement with the history of communications, perhaps for the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries more than any other era. Simply put, any attempt to study the shifting patterns of cultural perception and expectation in this period must take stock of the role the mass media, which have played an increasingly central role in the negotiation, reproduction and dissemination of cultural values.

However, for the twentieth century much of this work has been focused rather tightly around the development of the media per se rather than their wider social and political impact. As a result, the issues raised by such research are often not integrated very well into broader frameworks of interpretation. This marks an interesting contrast with work on earlier periods, in particular on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where scholars have long emphasized the interrelations between new reading habits, the rise of ‘bourgeois’ culture and the emergence of a new, broader ‘public’. At one level one might attribute this difference to the influence of Habermas’ work on the ‘public sphere’, which, for all its shortcomings (as scholars have noted since the early 1990s), seems to apply better to this earlier period than to subsequent eras. Despite the fact that Habermas has remained central to scholarly attempts to place communications within their wider social and political context in the twentieth century as well, recent historical research has tended to use different conceptual tools (eg. Bourdieu and ‘cultural studies’ approaches) quite fruitfully. This paper will thus consider the merits and limitations of several of these main approaches to the evolution of the media in twentieth-century Europe within the diachronically comparative setting of the panel. (Show less)



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