IS THERE A CANON IN THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY?
Please note new meeting time: third Tuesdays, 1-2:30 eastern time U.S.
Please join us for our first meeting of the 2023-24 academic year. Two things are on the agenda: a brief discussion of the upcoming year's schedule, and then a more substantial reflection on the idea of a canon in the history of technology.
We are posing two broad questions 1) whether there is a canon in history of technology, i.e., works with which we assume everyone is familiar -- perhaps Staudenmaier, Hughes's Networks of Power, etc. -- and how this has influenced work in the field; and 2) what works do people think that everyone should be familiar with now. A canon can help a field develop a unique and deep identity; a canon can also constrain work and artificially limit a field's boundaries. There may well be something to be said for a certain amount of incoherence in a discipline.
Here are some more specific questions we hope to take up: Are there certain books or articles that should be regarded as essential reading in the field? What characteristics, if any, do these works have in common? Do they make important theoretical or methodological contributions to the field? Do they feature people, places, or technologies that have previously been overlooked by other historians? Are they particularly well-written or widely cited? Are they prominently featured in undergraduate or graduate syllabi? We invite participants to share their answers to these questions and provide examples of “canonical” case studies from their respective subfields.
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