Picturing Networks: Railroads and Photographs (aModern) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2017
For many 20th century American landscape photographers, the work of iconoclastic writer and environmental philosopher John Brinckerhoff Jackson had tremendous influence. Jackson's valorizing of the vernacular, the everyday, and the working landscape was a part of the intellectual impetus behind the midcentury rise of photographic depiction of ordinary America, such as with the New Topographics photographers. More narrowly, his work has influenced how the American railroad system has been portrayed photographically. This paper returns to the source with an examination of Jackson's work, his aesthetic and intellectual position on photography and images. In the process, it demonstrates how landscape photographers working within the Jacksonian tradition have, over the last fifty years, significant shifted their focus from depictions of everyday life to a nostalgic exploration of the railroad as a socially, politically, and literally ruined space.
2017
This project aims to integrate large-scale data sources from the Digging into Data repositories with other types of relevant data on the railroad system, already assembled by the project directors. Our project seeks to develop useful tools for spatio-temporal visualization of these data and the relationships among them. Our interdisciplinary team includes computer science, history, and geography researchers. Because the railroad "system" and its spatio-temporal configuration appeared differently from locality-to-locality and region-to-region, we need to adjust how we "locate" and "see" the system. By applying data mining and pattern recognition techniques, software systems can be created that dynamically redefine the way spatial data are represented. Utilizing processes common to analysis in Computer Science, we propose to develop a software framework that allows these embedded concepts to be visualized and further studied.
The Transcontinentals Today: Railroading in the West, 150 years after Promontory
Railroad Heritage, 2019
In the 150 years since the completion of the first transcontinental railway, the practices of North American rail transportation have changed significantly, resulting in larger and more robust infrastructure in some places, but also retrenchment and abandonment in others. Photographers documenting this transportation landscape show an essential tension of these industrial spaces, one between persistence and precarity. Ultimately these photographs interrogate ideas of human relationship with the land, the passage of time, and the concept of mortality.
Points of contact: Nineteenth century visual rhetoric of the Underground Railroad
2006
Abstract Just as eighteenth century master seamstress Betsy Ross implemented more meanings and messages into the first American flag than what is obvious at first glance, so too did African American seamstresses weave messages into quilt patterns used on the Underground Railroad. Similar to the way themes of freedom and liberty in the Declaration of Independence were reinterpreted to include disenfranchised groups, Biblical themes such as heaven and the Promised Land were reinterpreted to include slaves. This study examines the visual rhetoric of nineteenth century textiles used by the Underground Railroad. From the evidence examined, I argue that the visual texts of quilting during the nineteenth century were complete multimedia devices used not only by African Americans but other disenfranchised groups such as Abolitionists, Native Americans, Woman Suffrage Activists and Freemasons. Nineteenth century visual rhetoric was significant both historically and rhetorically to many American subcultures.
Introduction: Precarious Connections: On the Promise and Menace of Railroad Projects
2020
Th is introduction attempts to situate railroads, which have rarely been the object of ethnographic attention, within current debates of anthropology and related disciplines. While mobility is certainly one dimension of human-railroad entanglements, the introduction calls to explore political, social, material, and aff ective lives of railroads in Europe and Asia as well. Often, connections provided by railroads are precarious at best: enveloped in state and local politics, they appear to some as promise and to others as menace. Planning, construction, decay, and reconstruction constitute the temporal and material life cycle of these infrastructures. Attending to particular ethnographic and historical contexts, the introduction aims to demonstrate how railroads, these potent symbols of modernity, continue to be good to think with.
The twentieth century, the formative period of historical archaeology, is marked by an ideological shift from the fervent consumerism and industrialism of the nineteenth century, towards a growing institutional concern for the nation’s finite natural and historical resources. A focused case study of twentieth century railroad stations highlights various themes pertinent to the discussion of the role of historical archaeology in the Historic Preservation Movement, which focuses on preservation and interpretation of resources. Each railroad station provides a unique view into the past and present local, state, and federal legislation and ideologies that directed the station’s construction, destruction or renovation, and adaptive reuse or preservation. This study of mostly extant railroad stations further provides an opportunity for dialogue between federal/state agencies, local communities, and historic practitioners, which facilitates the formation of legislation and ideologies that will shape the next 50 years of historic interpretation and preservation in the United States.
With the revision of canonical accounts of art history and the rise of digital humanities over the past two decades, networks have emerged as useful tools for visualizing the redistribution of dominant art historical narratives. Networks, however, represent nodes and edges, at times obscuring the social realities in between, and art historical scholarship on them has been critiqued for its lack of attention to art objects themselves. This session therefore asks: How can the concepts of network science be applied to art historical research? What new questions might be drawn from an exploration of social networks of the past? And how might artistic production itself be an instrumental component of, or even a vehicle for, networked action? We aim to consider the ways and means that network science might be used as a methodological tool of inquiry within the discipline of art history, and as a space to consider how networks have been understood historically both by artists and art historians. This session calls for short paper presentations, to be followed by a productive discussion/debate amongst presenters and attendees about the ramifications of social network science within art historical discourse. All disciplines, periods, and perspectives are encouraged to submit proposals. Session Chairs: Miriam Kienle, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Claire Kovacs, Canisius College; Lauren Applebaum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2011
The Venice Train Depot is a case study for an archaeology of transportation, an examination of new places and more rapid travels over the modern period. The goal of this approach is to capture the dynamics of landscapes, agency, and movement. There have been productive discussions of transportation networks and national integration; methodological discussions have noted the need to account of the movement of things in the analysis of the material record. The case study exposes the dynamics of change for the Florida frontier in the twentieth century focused on the construction of a railroad line and station in Venice, Florida.