Data

Within the historiographical field of “political architecture”, ministerial office buildings have always been a somewhat marginal subject, undeservedly deemed of secondary importance in relation to more “representative” types of political buildings. Dwelling on the insights of the nineteenth-century essayist Bagehot and the office historians Duffy and Gardey, my contribution postulates that from the early twentieth century onward, ministerial office architecture has become an essential functional

This book chapter concentrates on photography as a technology that goes beyond the image. The chapter looks at documentary photography as an institutional and material practice of humanitarian ‘propaganda’ and discusses how notions of childhood intensified the urgency of humanitarian campaigns. It analyzes how UNESCO carefully selected and edited David Seymour’s photographs of children of war-devasted Europe, and how the organization adapted and exploited his photographs for its own ends.

Stefan Krebs uses the case of Germany to investigate maintenance and repair as a central part of automobility. The chapter will look at two sides of car repair as the need to maintain the mobility function and the practice of a hobbyist consumer activity that promised status, community and identity. It highlights four aspects that framed repair as a necessary part of car consumption: the (un-)reliability of automobile technology; the emergence of a car repair infrastructure; repair costs, which determined to a large extent whether one could afford to drive a car; and DIY repair practices.

Recension de Jérôme Denis, Le Travail invisible des données. Éléments pour une sociologie des infrastructures scripturales, Paris, Presses des Mines, 2018, 206 pages

Recension de l'ouvrage de Florence Descamps, Archiver la mémoire. De l’histoire orale au patrimoine immatériel, Paris, Éd. de l'EHESS, 2019, 241 pages