Raw Materials of the Humanities

The 19th and early 20th centuries are an important reference point for the institutionalization of the humanities. Universities in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere saw the emergence of new theories and methods in the humanities, and new chairs, departments, and institutes were established, some of which explicitly distinguished themselves from the natural sciences, while others maintained old connections between cultures of knowledge or established new ones. At the same time, this period witnessed the emergence of numerous new media whose mass use depended on the continuous availability of large quantities of so-called raw materials and synthetic substances. The aim of the proposed project is to show the multiple connections between these developments, which have so far been considered separately by historians of media, knowledge, and economics. The project starts with the "media-technical apriori" of knowledge formation, much described in media studies, in order to shift the focus to the "material apriori," i.e., to the myriad raw and substitute materials that made modern mass media production possible in the first place. In so doing, the project understands "raw materials" as constructs of an economic dispositive, resulting from strategies of local and global appropriation as well as from discursive, technical, and medial transformations of material resources. We wish to show to what extent the humanities of modernity helped to shape this resource economy through their respective use of media and research practices, some of which are still relevant today. Thus, our project combines a currently emerging historiography of the humanities (history of humanities) with new research approaches in the field of media ecology and media economics (ecomedia studies). The project is divided into three subprojects, each of which focuses on a media genre and material type central to the practice of the humanities: written media/paper (subproject 1), sound media/wax (subproject 2), and image media/cellulose nitrate (subproject 3). At the same time, each of the three projects makes independent new contributions to the history and theory of media formats and practices (subproject 1), a material-based transmediality (subproject 2), and the materiality of visual knowledge production (subproject 3). Methodologically, all three subprojects work with comparative, micro-historical case studies on the media use of different humanities and combine these with longue durée studies on the raw materials and supply chains of the respective media. All three subprojects can draw on rich, previously untapped archival collections. Extending the spectrum of methods, it is planned to conduct material analyses of preserved medial objects of the subprojects in order to provide insights into their exact material composition.