Out-of-place technological artifacts and productive unease

Gregory’s last post on Babbage and railroads, illustrated by that arresting Montparnasse train wreck photo, got me thinking about Victorian visual technologies and their ability to register accidents as phenomena. At the same time, Daniel’s analogy between aircraft data recorders (black boxes), on the one hand, and Babbage’s proposal for their 19th-century railroad equivalents, on [...]

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peer-review and machine anxiety

As my first test-post, I thought I’d pass along a recent exchange on the Humanist email list. This doesn’t fall squarely within Victorian studies exactly, but it does play on some familiar Victorian themes like machine anxiety and the boundaries of automation. Note that although the given date of the first post is March 31st, [...]

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