Dear list-members,
Please see below for details of an exciting, fully funded PhD on the History of Telephony and a chance to work with BT Archives and the Science Museum.
Applications are invited for an AHRC-funded doctoral student to join King’s College London, BT Archives, and the Science Museum Group in late September 2015 or early January 2016 to investigate the impact of the telephone landline network on British society and culture(s).
The project is informed by the rise of the Internet and social media, the interest this has generated in understanding how networks grow and evolve over time, and how this can be connected to wider changes in society. The comprehensive historical and technical archive managed by BT represents a unique resource for researchers, grounding an analysis of ‘impact’ in an understanding of the network as an object materialised through a range of artefacts: from physical cables and switches, to abstract statistics on usage by homes and businesses.
The project objectives are:
To produce new histories of network development and in so doing, to contribute to contemporary debates about the cultural effects of a network society.
To develop an open access data set documenting the evolution of the landline phone network.
To use this data as a platform to examine the changing character/characteristics of the network.
To explore the (uneven) impact of this connectivity on local communities, identities and cultures through, for instance, the spreading of news and coordination of social movements and organisations.
To support the development of interactive online resources for Science Museum Group & BT Archives audiences.
The student is free to specify the sociocultural impact that they wish to study in conjunction with their work on network evolution, aligning the project’s aims with their own interests.
For more details visit: http://www.reades.com/2015/06/22/history-of-telephony/
Best wishes,
Alison
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