Steampunk, he argues, gives us a new reading practice, one that isn't constrained by historical period or close reading but instead gives us access to "a startlingly diverse set of narratives about ...the nineteenth century, themselves a consequence of the objects, cultures, signals, and interfaces used to access that history" (5). At other times, this means digital humanities practices that study the nineteenth-century, which might include a digital forum for the Journal of Victorian Culture Online about baking from Victorian recipes or Lego enthusiasts re-making Charles Babbage's difference engine. Chapter Two continues to examine mechanization, first reading Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings (2015) to develop a steampunk understanding of the way that culture impacts technological development. ...the epilogue picks up the thread of temporal frameworks from the beginning of the book, looking to the posthuman Victorian history evidenced in steampunk video games such as Sunless Sea and Bloodborne.
This essay argues E. E. Cummings's "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r" (1935) anticipates the contemporary practice of experimental writing known as codework. Encoding through typographical means the action ...sequence of the grasshopper's leap, Cummings transformed his mechanical typewriter into the equivalent of a hardware device supplied with the necessary software for running the poem as a program. The three permutations of "grasshopper"—"r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r," "PPEGORHRASS," and "gRrEaPsPhOs"—reflect a block cipher method of encryption, each one comprising a subkey governing the operations of its surrounding textual arrangement. Like the punch cards driving Jacquard's loom and Babbage's Analytical Engine, these subkeys weave for us a digital grasshopper.
In 1832, the mathematician, economist, and computing pioneer Charles Babbage published a long treatise titled On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. At the end of one of its early chapters, ..."Of Copying," Babbage concludes by inviting his readers to consider the printed letterforms that make up the very book they currently hold in their hands. The page before them is the final product, Babbage notes, of "six successful stages of copying": the initial carving of a punch; the creation of a matrix; the casting of type from the matrix; the forming of a plaster mold from set type; the casting of the stereotype plate from the mold; and finally, impressing the reverse image of that plate, in ink, on the page that the reader now examines. Here, Makala examines one aspect of a larger series of questions surrounding the early adoption, use, and significance of the shift from printing exclusively from standing type to the creation, printing, and new set of cultural meanings generated by printing with stereotype plates in the US.
Divided Labors examines how literary narratives articulate and model division of labor,which was a core organizing principle of the social body, industrial economy, and knowledgeproduction in the ...first half of the nineteenth century in industrial Britain. Investigating the waythat narrative simultaneously articulates and embodies division of labor and other politicaleconomic ideas, this dissertation examines the narrative innovations made by Conversations onPolitical Economy (1816) by Jane Marcet, the “Days at the Factories” (1841-1844) tours byGeorge Dodd, and the social novel, Shirley (1849) by Charlotte Brontë. Division of labor,through its logics of organization, helps give comprehensibility to the vast and complexindustrial economy and populous social body. It does this by distilling interconnected networksof productive relationships between laborers, machines, tools, factories, industries, and classesdown to two related activities: dividing and combining. The organizational logics of the divisionof labor were, I argue, adapted into literary forms that serve both narrative and economicpurposes; as a result, it also is an iterative vehicle by which economic knowledge is created, andideologies are constructed and naturalized.
Babbage's two lives FISCH, MENACHEM
The British journal for the history of science,
03/2014, Letnik:
47, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Babbage wrote two relatively detailed, yet significantly incongruous, autobiographical accounts of his pre-Cambridge and Cambridge days. He published one in 1864 and in it advertised the existence of ...the other, which he carefully retained in manuscript form. The aim of this paper is to chart in some detail for the first time the discrepancies between the two accounts, to compare and assess their relative credibility, and to explain their author's possible reasons for knowingly fabricating the less credible of the two.
