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

这项博士论文研究改进基金——由美国国家科学基金会的科学、技术和社会项目提供——支持一个研究19世纪法国摄影和早期法国电影在形成科学家、专家用户、记者和其他追随者之间的社会网络中的作用的项目。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；分析社区对于表达和定义新形式的专业身份（如摄影记者和纪录片制作人）的重要性；调查先前存在的关系如何影响了这些专业网络在法国倡导摄影的方式。这个项目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，本项目开发了一种方法，超越了强调新形式的大众媒体和流行景观的出现，以断言社交网络在倡导新技术方面发挥的重要作用。它还有助于从侧重于设计师和用户角色的技术社会学研究中派生出的方法。该项目观察了技术如何产生更广泛的社交领域——期刊、俱乐部、公共讲座、课程——在这些领域，思想、身份和用法不断被辩论和重新定义。因此，该项目试图通过了解技术专家社区如何辩论和促进技术的采用和推广，并在特定的国家和文化形式中这样做，来联系和完善视觉文化和技术研究领域。

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.