Workshop: Technical Timelines
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Workshop: Technical Timelines

Week
Dates
September 19, 2024
Type
LectureLab
Section
Rationality Technology & Power
Reading

Location
In Class
Related to Due Dates (Class)

Lecture

TBD

Field Work Session: Technical History

Last week was about the cultural history of your object, but today we’re going to shift focus to a technology history. So, we’re going to take a technological historical view of your object.

Using any medium you’d like (digital or analog, whiteboard, or sketch pad), create a timeline of your object. The timeline should document the technologies (be creative and detailed in your thinking here) needed to be developed for your object to come into the world.

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For example, if your object is a true crime podcast, you might go back to the late 1800s when “trials of the century” were widely followed in local newspapers and note the tech used to produce newspaper. We can trace the interest in crime and reportage from journalism (radio) into reality television (how did TVs and cameras work to show or hide ideas) into YouTube videos (what technologies drove YouTube video uploads? ) and into true crime podcasts (what technologies made podcasting easier? Microphones, home recording equipment).
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think deeply about the integrations needed to make media work. Some are obvious (data storage) some area less obvious (APIs and Webhooks). You can also think about the development of languages or protocols (C++, SQL, HTML). Trace the underlying technologies in as much detail as possible.

Steps:

  1. Make a technical timeline and be creative in it’s presentation. The research and drawing should take approximately 10 minutes.
  2. Get into a group of about four students, and compare the timelines. Note the similarities, and differences.
  3. Combine your timelines and highlight the major technologies at play. Post the combined timeline on Teams so that we can all see them.
  4. Turn in your timeline into eLearning for Journal 3.

Turn in to eLearning

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I’ll happily take either written paragraphs or an audio file for your weekly journals.

  1. A short paragraph explaining your timeline & how it related to your group.
  2. A short paragraph that covers the following from the reading this week:
    1. How this week’s reading related to the previous week’s reading
    2. Something you found insightful, interesting, or confusion from the weeks reading
  3. A copy of the timeline you produced in class (an image is fine)