Lab Book

Darren Wershler is Concordia University Research Chair in media and contemporary literature, cofounder of the Media History Research Centre, and Director of the Residual Media Depot in the Milieux Institute at Concordia University in Montreal. Wershler’s other books include Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg; The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting; and FREE as in Speech and Beer: Open Source, Peer-to-Peer, and the Economics of the Online Revolution. Lori Emerson is associate professor in the Department of English and director of the Intermedia Arts, Writing, and Performance Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is founding director of the Media Archaeology Lab and author of Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (Minnesota, 2014). Jussi Parikka is professor of technological culture and aesthetics at the Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and founding codirector of the Archaeologies of Media and Technology research unit. He is visiting professor at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague, as research leader for the project Operational Images. He is author of A Geology of Media; Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology; and The Anthrobscene; coauthor of Remain; and editor of Digital Memory and the Archive, all from Minnesota.

"Lively, timely, and filled with vivid examples, The Lab Book is a highly readable and critically sophisticated account of current lab culture. Written by three distinguished practitioners, it examines the rhetoric that links real and imaginary ideas of experimentality with systems of power and authority across a surprising range of disciplines. A fun, smart, useful guide to ongoing work in media studies."-Johanna Drucker, author of Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to Display"The Lab Book is a crucial intervention into humanities labs and their precarious institutional environments. Situated between science and technology studies (STS) and media archaeology, Wershler, Emerson, and Parikka’s book develops a heuristic for analyzing these hybrid spaces, producing a valuable tool for understanding the assemblages of space, apparatus, infrastructure, people, and imaginaries supporting their existence."-Theory, Culture & Society"Richly illustrated and well argued, these chapters convincingly showcase the benefits of adopting the extended laboratory model to enhance the study of past and present laboratories."-Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society"The Lab Book very successfully makes a complex and compelling case for a new understanding and appreciation of labs, as well as their value in media studies and beyond."-Information & Culture

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Everything Is a LabCase Study: The French Language Lab (Middlebury College, U.S.)1. Lab SpaceCase Study: Menlo Park Laboratory (Menlo Park, U.S.)Case Study: MIT Media Lab, Part 1 (MIT, U.S.)Case Study: Media Archaeological Fundus (Humboldt University, Germany)2. Lab ApparatusCase Study: The Signal Laboratory (Humboldt University, Germany)Case Study: The Media Archaeology Lab (University of Colorado Boulder, U.S.)3. Lab InfrastructureCase Study: Home Economics Labs and Extension on the Canadian Prairies (Manitoba, Canada)Case Study: Black Laboratories and Agricultural Extension4. Lab PeopleCase Study: MIT Media Lab, Part 2 (MIT, U.S.)Case Study: ActLab (University of Texas Austin, U.S.)5. Lab ImaginariesCase Study: Hybrid Spaces of Experimentation and ParapsychologyCase Study: Bell Labs, A Factory for Ideas6. Lab TechniquesConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex