Introduction: What is hands on media history? / John Ellis and Nick Hall -- Why hands on history matters / John Ellis -- Bringing the living back to life : what happens when we re-enact the recent past? / Nick Hall -- A blind date with the past : transforming television documentary practice into a research method / Amanda Murphy -- (De)habituation histories : how to re-sensitize media historians / Andreas Fickers and Annie van den Oever -- (Un)certain ghosts: rephotography and historical images / Mary Agnes Krell -- Photography against the Anthropocene : the anthotype as a call for action / Kristof Vrancken -- On the performance of playback for dead media devices / Matthew Hockenberry and Jason LaRiviere -- The archaeology of the Walkman : audience perspectives and the roots of mobile media intimacy / Marus̆a Pus̆nik -- Extended play : hands on with forty years of English amusement arcades / Alex Wade -- Enriching 'hands on history' through community dissemination : a case study of the Pebble Mill Project / Vanessa Jackson -- The media archaeology lab as platform for undoing and reimagining media history / Lori Emerson -- Reflections and reminiscences : tactile encounters and participatory research with vintage media technology in the museum / Christian Hviid Mortensen and Lise Kapper -- A vision in Bakelite : exploring the aesthetic, material and operational potential of the Bush TV22 / Elinor Groom -- Hands on circuits : preserving the semantic surplus of circuit-level functionality with programmable logic devices / Fabian Offert.

"Media always involve technologies. Understanding media means understanding their technologies. But little can be learned from just looking at redundant pieces of equipment. The rapidly developing approach of hands on history can open our minds to new perceptions of how media technologies work and how we work with them. Hands On Media History explores the whole range of hands on history techniques for the first time. It offers both practical guides and general perspectives. It covers both analogue and digital media; film, television, video, gaming, photography and recorded sound. Essays in the collection explore the difficult questions of reconstruction and historical memory, and the issues of equipment degradation and loss. Hands on Media History is concerned with both the professional and the amateur, the producers and the users. Essays outline the wide variety of approaches to understanding media history through its technologies, including the issue of fresh uses for old equipment and artefacts. Hands on media history offers a new perspective on one of the modern era's most urgent questions: what is the relationship between people and the technologies they use every day?"-- Provided by publisher.

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.