Order 690965: Read Instructions

“When old media technologies were new” MEDST 100 -- Final Exam Alternative Project.

Due: Thursday Dec 14, end of day by email to [email protected] Eligibility: You may opt to complete this project in lieu of the final exam if you have a 90% or better, have missed no more than one quiz, and have demonstrated outstanding attendance and participation. To confirm your eligibility, contact Professor Crain. Description: This project involves conducting primary historical research using electronic databases available through the Queens College Library. You will locate and summarize two newspaper or magazine articles around the theme: “When old media technologies were new.” Using information and materials from class as your guide, you will search archives for news reports or commentary from the early periods of any of the following media technologies: photography, film, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, mainframe computers, or personal computers. The articles you select should illustrate any of the following (or combination thereof):

1) How the technology was imagined, received, or understood while it was developing 2) A sense of genealogy (perhaps by mentioning a failed competing technology, or multiple

inventors) 3) Attendant social questions or controversies in areas like politics, economics, and culture

(e.g. showing the moral panic around early cinema, the debates around radio spectrum policy, or how particular business models developed)

What you will turn in: You will turn in PDFs of each article and a short summary that explains very explicitly how the articles illustrate the above theme(s). The summary should be no longer than one page and should list citations for the articles (using any format you choose). It can be MS Word or PDF format. Important note: I will confirm receipt via email. If you do not hear back from me within 24 hours, I did not receive your project. Follow up. Library Databases: I suggest you use any of the following databases, accessible through the Queens College Library website. You can access these on and off campus and can search by date, keyword, full text, and many other options. In some of the larger databases, you may want to limit your search to newspapers or magazines.

• New York Times Historical (ProQuest) • Artemis Primary Sources • Nineteenth Century Collection (Gale) • Readers' Guide Retrospective: 1890-1982 (EBSCO) • LexisNexis Academic