Images, Technology, and History

Scholars are giving increased attention to images as historical evidence. This feature of the journal seeks to analyze images relating to technology, with two aims: To more fully integrate our understanding of technology into broader historical accounts and as a means to reflect on historical method.

At a basic level, images may record a technology's presence in history, depicting where, when, and how it was deployed, as well as the different social, artistic, and cultural contexts in which it was produced and encountered. In addition, images themselves are technological products that may act as catalysts, changing the paradigms through which we see and apprehend the world.

Careful analyses of images, too, can highlight fundamental problems of historical explanation. In their specificity, images address the production of knowledge and culture, as situated in a particular moment in time and space. In their use of conventional codes of representation they speak to larger and enfolding social, cultural, and political structures. Images, in concentrated fashion, push us to understand the interplay between the empirical and interpretation.

The editors of History and Technology invite submissions of short essays (approx. 2000 words) that address the visual history of technology. Essays should focus on 1-3 visual representations, and might approach the images from a variety of different theoretical positions. Possibilities include: the formal or iconographic content of the representations; the social and cultural implications of how different technologies are represented or who used them; the audience and reception of different representations of technologies; the history of different media and their technological antecedents; or the ways in which technology changed the sensory experience of the world. Essays are preferred that discuss the historiographic issues raised through the analysis of images.