A frequently mentioned if somewhat peripheral figure in the historiography of late nineteenth-century linguistics is the German sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893). Today Gabelentz is chiefly remembered for several insights that proved to be productive in the development of subsequent schools and subdisciplines. I…[Read more]

Review of Evaluating Cartesian Linguistics, by Christina Behme

Review of the Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics, ed. by Keith Allan

The multifaceted concept of ‘form’ plays a central tole in the linguistic work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), where it is deeply entwined with aesthetic questions. H. Steinthal’s (1823–1899) interpretation of linguistic form, however, made it the servant of psychology. The Formungstrieb (drive to formation) of Georg von der Gabelentz…[Read more]

“In this essay, my interest is in how imagined media futures are implicated in the work of producing novel web publishing technology. I explore the issue through an account of the emergence of Slashdot, the tech news and discussion site that by 1999 had implemented a number of recommendation features now associated with social media and web 2.0…[Read more]

Preprint of chapter from the SAGE Handbook of Social Media (Burgess, Marwick and Poell, eds., 2018).

“How should we think of the relationship between social media and the early web, and what can we learn from this history?”

This article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to understand the regenerative “belief in the new” in new media culture and web history. I begin by noting that discursive constructions of the web as disruptive, open, and participatory have emerged at various points in the medium’s history, and that these discourses are not as neatly tied to…[Read more]

This article critically interrogates key assumptions in popular web discourse by revisiting an early example of web ‘participation.’ Against the claim that Web 2.0 technologies ushered in a new paradigm of participatory media, I turn to the history of HotWired, Wired magazine’s ambitious web-only publication launched in 1994. The case shows how d…[Read more]