Raw Materials of the Humanities

The 19^th and early 20^th centuries marked a pivotal phase in the institutionalization of the humanities. Across universities in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, new theories and methods emerged alongside the establishment of dedicated chairs and departments. During this period, the humanities also began to undertake long-term, large-scale initiatives in publishing, collecting, and archiving—endeavors now often described as the “big humanities.” At the same time, numerous new media arose, whose production and mass dissemination depended on the continuous availability of raw materials and synthetic substances in large quantities.

“Raw Materials of the Humanities” traces the multiple connections between these developments, which have so far been considered separately by historians of media, knowledge, and economics. Our interest extends beyond the media technologies that made large-scale projects in the humanities possible. We focus on their material preconditions—the myriad raw and substitute materials that first enabled modern mass media and, in turn, the formation of knowledge in the humanities. We regard “raw materials” as constructs of an economic dispositif, resulting from strategies of local and global appropriation and from the discursive, technical, and media transformations of material resources. Our project asks how the modern humanities helped to shape this resource economy through their media uses and research practices, some of which are still applied today. It thus combines the emerging historiography of the humanities with new research approaches in the field of media ecology and media economics.

The project comprises three subprojects, each centered on major humanities undertakings in the decades around 1900 and defined by a distinct media genre with its enabling materials: paper archiving and wood (subproject 1), sound archiving and wax (subproject 2), and film archiving and cellulose nitrate (subproject 3).