Hands on Media History

A new methodology in the humanities and social sciences

Nick Hall, John Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138577480
• eBook ISBN: 9781351247399
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Hands on Media History explores the whole range of hands on media history techniques for the first time, offering both practical guides and general perspectives. It covers both analogue and digital media; film, television, video, gaming, photography and recorded sound.

Understanding media means understanding the technologies involved. The hands on history approach can open our minds to new perceptions of how media technologies work and how we work with them. Essays in this collection explore the difficult questions of reconstruction and historical memory, and the issues of equipment degradation and loss. Hands on Media History is concerned with both the professional and the amateur, the producers and the users, providing a new perspective on one of the modern era's most urgent questions: what is the relationship between people and the technologies they use every day?

Engaging and enlightening, this collection is a key reference for students and scholars of media studies, digital humanities, and for those interested in models of museum and research practice.

Part I
Media histories

1
Why Hands on History Matters

John Ellis

The hands on approach to history responds to the presence of complex technologies in all aspects of human existence since the industrial revolution, and in particular to the recent growth of ‘black box’ electronic devices. The ‘gamble’ of the hands on approach is that the physical experience of machinery brings insights that cannot be gained in any other way. It is a commonplace that most people, faced with an unfamiliar piece of technology, do not read the instruction manual. Instead, they try it out. The interaction of body, mind, and machine that results from these encounters enables learning and develops skills. So it is with the experience of an unfamiliar piece of historical technology. Written descriptions are not enough to develop a real understanding of the machine and its functioning. Physical experience is needed to inform the understanding, and to eliminate misapprehensions and misunderstandings. Once someone has handled a film projector, they can more easily understand how it worked, what its particular affordances were, and what ‘aura’ it could create in the cinematic experience. Similarly, just to pick up a film camera gives a vivid experience of its particular ‘heft’, its weight, balance, and manoeuvrability, and that physical experience gives insight into how it could (and could not) be used in practice.

To go this far is a valuable educational experience, and should be a key part of any researcher’s training. Beyond it lie a further series of questions. It is clear to begin with that the experience of handling a single piece of technology as a novice will be very different from that of either an experienced user or a trained professional user. This leads some to propose a ‘media archaeology’ that seeks to explore the many potential affordances of the many machines that come down to us from history, rather than the affordances that were realized in the context of their historically situated use (Ernst 2012; Parikka 2012, etc.). This certainly works with mechanical devices of all kinds (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011), and it is important in encouraging researchers to enter into a new mindset: that of the skilled user of a technology. However, its application to the ‘black box’ technologies that are now proliferating is less obvious, as these technologies are effectively scattered across the physical and the virtual, between the tool at hand and the software and data services that it requires to give it life.

Moreover, the affordances of technologies are always realized within historically situated institutional implementations, and technologies are often designed with these in mind. Institutional considerations will also bear down even on those seeking alternative or counterfactual uses, just as much as they do on mainstream and everyday uses. Experimental media archaeology will always take place within institutions of experimentation or ‘play’: universities, museums, hackathons, and so on. Histories of the institutions of television broadcasting exist for many national contexts. Equally, we also have several traditions of advanced analysis of the products of the process, the films, and programmes. But there are hardly any accounts of the space that lies between the decisions by executives to invest in and deploy particular suites of technologies, and the emergence of those films and programmes on the other. This is the underexplored realm of enactment or operationalization. Often labelled misleadingly as ‘media practice’, this is the complex arena where creative decisions are made in full awareness of the institutional requirements for particular kinds of aesthetic products. Media professionals know what is required of them and they deliver it; they equally know that one of the requirements of them is a degree of originality or innovation, and they will often look to the underexplored affordances of the available technology to help deliver that degree of innovation. ‘Media practice’ is therefore a dynamic realm which is best understood by addressing the interplay of people and machines, and machines with other machines.

It is also clear from media practice that machines, even analogue machines, are not typically used alone: they occur in larger ensembles, as part of complex processes that have various stages or involve the use of several machines at once. To film using celluloid involves a camera, lights, and sound recorders; the product of that initial process then passes through further stages of film development, editing, dubbing, and printing, and, finally, projection. Each stage involves particular skills and individuals with a high level of skill in one stage may well be unable to carry out a basic operation in another. Hands on history has to come to terms with these key aspects of the imbrication of humans with technologies. It has to enable the novice users to translate their experiences and insights into a full understanding of the human/technological ensemble which, at a particular moment in history, was capable of producing extraordinary objects and experiences. Hands on history, in other words, has to come to terms with the processes of that skilled individuals went through, just as much as it has to enable an exploratory and experiential approach to learning.

This implies a process of documentation of the work of skilled individuals. Alongside the experiential knowledge generated by handling and experimenting with old machines, the hands on approach has to develop of knowledge bank of information about the skilled use of those machines in the circumstances of their historically situated implementation. These certainly involve industrial and institutional contexts of which we have authoritative accounts as noted earlier. However, when it comes to accounts of the operation of the machines involved, we run up against a set of problems. The users of the technologies, as a rule, do not have the descriptive or analytic discourses to describe systematically what they used to do. So much is tied up in their muscle memory, in the things that they had to learn to do automatically. The approach adopted by the ERC funded ADAPT research project (2013–8) was to go beyond interviews and stage encounters between equipment and their skilled users.¹ The simplest of these encounters involved individuals explaining and demonstrating particular pieces of equipment. Even these encounters yielded far more than a conventional interview because the physical presence equipment triggered fresh memories and the opportunity to handle it once again enabled a voyage of discovery. The ADAPT project was also far more ambitious in enabling encounters between teams of former professionals and the arrays of equipment they used, together, to produce television. The chapters by Amanda Murphy, Nick Hall, and Vanessa Jackson in this collection all explore aspects of this work.

In a way, this method simply develops what most individuals do when they are faced with a piece of equipment. They do not reach for the instructions handbook, even in the increasingly rare cases where such a thing is provided. Instead, they resort to the audio-visual ‘how to’ material that can easily be found on YouTube and elsewhere. Audio-visual accounts are clearly the preferable complement to the physical experience of a piece of machinery as they, too, demonstrate the involvement of hand and eye, mind and body. The ADAPT project applied this insight successfully to documenting the activities of the skilled professionals who made broadcast television programmes in the analogue era, as is described by Murphy and Hall elsewhere in this collection. This process of documentation requires considerable modifications to traditional research methods. It requires that curators and researchers enter unfamiliar kinds of engagements with objects and with people. It also requires a fresh approach to the presentation of documentation (for example, as ‘how they used to’ videos as well as written accounts).

The hands on method renders visible and perceptible aspects of human experience that have been neglected by exclusively written, word-based analyses. The use of audio-visual documentation of hands on practices makes visible much that has escaped analysis in the past. Viewing filmed footage opens up the world to a fresh process of seeing. The viewer is enabled to see actions, attitudes and exchanges that would have been overlooked by even alert observers during the actual filming. Multiple camera points of view can capture interactions of people with people, people with machines, and machines with machines that are simply too complex or too fleeting to be apprehended in the flow of events. Recent media theory (Nichols 1991; Renov 1993; Bruzzi 2006; Ellis 2012, etc.), has emphasized that documentary filming is a specific form of intervention into the world, enabling a reconstruction of vision that is both mobile and analytic. The camera and the sound recorder can be seen as new extensions of the human, enabling new explorations of the world by the very act of preserving moments for later inspection. Further, they enable forms of selection and rearrangement of motion in time and space that can open them up to further analysis. This is particularly the case when using a set-up of multiple cameras and sound recorders, as is now possible. From this perspective, it might seem odd that the filming of activities (rather than interviews) is not a more standard approach to social research. However, the technological arrays that would be both suitable and affordable are only just becoming available, and, as Amanda Murphy explores in this collection, the current working practices of television also require adaptation before they can be deployed in a research setting.

The gains from a hands on approach will be great. Researchers will at last be able to perceive that which is not easily articulated in words alone. The ‘hands on’ method combines audio-visual recording and with the direct sensory experiences of researchers. Researchers deploy a combination of audio-visual recording of skilled users with the immersion of the researcher into similar or analogous physical interactions with those machines. They would both experience for themselves and observe the experiences of others. This would enable researchers to perceive the physicality of human/machine interactions; to grasp the processes that are not verbalized by the human participants in those activities; and, importantly, to observe the activities of teams of humans working with arrays of machinery.

The hands on approach provides a solution to the problem of ethnography so eloquently posed by Geertz (1973) in describing his method of ‘thick description’:

Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a manuscript – foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behaviour.

(Geertz 1973, 10)

Geertz further emphasizes that any kind of ethnographic description

is interpretative; what it is interpretive of is the flow of social discourse; and the interpreting involved consists of trying to rescue the ‘said’ of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms.

(Geertz 1973, 20)

Audio-visual recording using multiple cameras enables the fixing of Geertz’s ‘perishing occasions’; and then the researcher’s own hands on experience guides the interpretive process. This hands on approach provides access to the experiences of the skilled users of technologies, whether they are professionals going about a defined task, or citizens interacting with the many devices that populate the everyday world. So this method can tell us about how ‘being in the world’ has been and is now constituted. It can reveal the nature of what has been termed ‘the new hybrid’, or ‘hybrid agents’: how human and machine work together as a single entity. As Daniel Miller (2010, cover) remarked “things make us just as much as we make things”, an insight that only increases in relevance as microelectronics are deployed across everyday life.

The ‘gamble’ of the hands on approach is therefore an intellectual approach that has important consequences for our attitudes to knowledge and learning. The hands on approach to technologies explored here would have several stages, each of which has its own value and importance for the researcher. In summary, they are:

1. To obtain and explore a machine for its affordances. The researcher(s) see, feel and understand how it works and what it might be capable of doing when free of the institutional constraints in which it was, historically, deployed.
2. To experiment with combinations of machines to discover how they work together and what they might be capable of achieving, understanding the way that machines have a transformative and combinatory potential.
3. To discover and document the communities that have developed advanced skills in combination with the machines within defined historical contexts.
4. To document the ensembles of machinery, the technical arrays and the working practices into which they are or were inserted.
5. To experiment with using, or getting professionals to use, those technical arrays in the way that they were once used. This will discover ‘from the inside’ what mutual adaptations were involved of people to machines, machines to people, and people to people.
6. To understand both the affordances of the machines and the affordances of the institutions or work-places into which they are or were inserted. These two classes of affordances are mutually determining: the individuals operating within institutions explore the affordances of the technologies; the institutions mould these affordances to their aims; and the designers of technologies take account of their institutional deployment.

The importance of the hands on approach

The approach outlined above has yielded substantial insights when deployed in the ADAPT project. Two examples will demonstrate their nature. Early in the project’s history, an initial experimental ‘simulation’ (as the project designated professional/equipment encounters, see Hall) was mounted using an extant 16mm film cutting room that survived at the London Film School. Once commonplace when most television production outside studios or major live events used film, these technological arrays have almost disappeared. In addition to the iconic editing table (Steenbeck being a key manufacturer), these rooms included large amounts of ancillary equipment: bins for the off-cuts of footage, cans for storage of film reels, rewind benches and cores to wind film round, chinagraph pencils to mark them with, and, crucially, a Pic-Sync for coordinating the strips of magnetic 16mm footage to which the sound tape recordings had been transferred to the 16mm film footage. We were fortunate find this survival that still contained all these items in working order. The simulation also involved two generations of editors, Oliver White and Dawn Trotman.

Dawn Trotman had begun as Oliv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction: what is hands on media history?
• PART I Media histories
• PART II User communities
• PART III Labs, archives and museums
• Index