DDRIG: Seeing Is Knowing: Objectivity and the Creation of French Visual Culture, 1870-1930

这篇博士论文研究改进基金--由美国国家科学基金会的科学、技术与社会项目提供--支持一个项目，该项目考察了19世纪法国摄影和早期法国电影在科学家、专家用户、记者和其他追随者之间形成社交网络的作用。该项目的目标包括分析自我认同的追随者的技术社区如何使技术的采用合法化；分析社区对于阐明和定义摄影记者和纪录片人等新的职业身份形式是如何重要的；以及调查先前存在的关系如何影响这些专业网络在法国代表摄影倡导的方式。这个项目的更广泛的影响是将技术的社会学方法与现代视觉文化的历史联系起来。关于现代视觉文化研究，该项目开发了一种方法，不仅强调新形式的大众媒体和流行奇观的出现，还断言社交网络在倡导新技术方面发挥的重要作用。它还促进了从技术社会学研究中衍生出来的方法，这些研究侧重于设计师和用户的角色。这个项目观察了技术如何产生更广泛的社交领域--期刊、俱乐部、公开讲座、课程--在这些领域中，想法、身份和用法不断地被辩论和重新定义。因此，该项目力求通过了解技术专家群体如何辩论和促进采用和推广技术，并在特定的国家和文化形式中这样做，从而将视觉文化和技术研究领域联系起来并加以完善。

This doctoral dissertation research improvement grant--made by the Science, Technology & Society program at NSF--supports a project that examines the role of nineteenth-century French photography and early French cinema in forming social networks among scientists, expert users, journalists, and other adherents. The objectives of this project include analyzing how technological communities of self-identified adherents legitimate the adoption of technologies; analyzing how communities are important for articulating and defining new forms of professional identity like photojournalists and documentarians; and investigating how pre-existing relationships shaped the way these specialist networks advocated on photography's behalf in France. The broader impact of this project is to relate sociological approaches to technology to the history of modern visual culture. With regard to modern visual culture studies, this project develops an approach that goes beyond emphasizing the emergence of new forms of mass media and popular spectacles to assert the important role that social networks play in advocating new technologies. It also contributes to approaches that derive from sociology of technology studies that focus on the role of designers and users. This project observes how technologies engender broader spheres of sociability--journals, clubs, public lectures, curricula--where ideas, identities, and usages are continually debated and redefined. Consequently, the project seeks to relate and refine both the fields of visual culture and technology studies by seeking to understand how communities of technologists debate and promote the adoption and extension of technologies and do so within specific national and cultural forms.