1970s
A device is more than what it helped invent
A useful history of technology does not line objects up as a procession of inventions. It asks what they promised, what they enabled people to do, and what evidence survives of their use.
Everyday technology that transformed our routines
Latest additions
2000s
Video game history does not fit into a single timeline
A history of video games can begin with dates, works or cultural shifts, but each source supports different claims. Reading them together helps distinguish documentation, interpretation and memory.
Contemporary
A Song Leaves Traces Beyond Its Sound
Scores, multimedia archives and recordings are not interchangeable forms of evidence. The available sources offer a way to explore what each record preserves and why distinguishing a work, an edition and a medium matters when reconstructing music history.
Contemporary
Preserving a game is not the same as preserving a playthrough
Doom offers a way to frame a present-day preservation question: retaining information, keeping software legible and recreating an experience are related aims, but not identical ones. The available evidence points to technical challenges as well as limits on what can be claimed.
Contemporary
The Television That Remains Outside the Screen
Research on audiovisual archives helps frame what can be reconstructed about television—and what requires other evidence: a surviving programme is not, by itself, a schedule or a record of the viewing experience.
Contemporary
A Video Game in a Museum Is Still Something to Play
Museums and archives can present video games as cultural works, but preserving and interpreting them raises a particular question: how do you exhibit something whose identity also depends on playing it?
Contemporary
A Musical Ensemble Leaves More Than Recordings
Scores, programmes, photographs and recordings document different aspects of musical life. Read together, they help us study a cultural practice without confusing the work with the traces it left behind.
Contemporary
The Device Does Not End at the Display Case: Reading Technology Through Museum Archives
Archives in science and technology museums preserve and disseminate documentation that can also shed light on institutional and collection histories. A guide to distinguishing what each document can support—and what remains unverified.
Contemporary
Preserving a video game also means preserving the evidence around it
Museums, libraries and archives approach video games as cultural heritage. The available documentation encourages looking beyond the machine, without mistaking preservation initiatives for evidence about every work or play experience.
Contemporary
Technology’s history is more than a list of inventions
Historical overviews help organize major changes and milestones, but they do not by themselves explain how each device was used. A careful reading separates what the sources document from questions that still require verifiable manuals, advertisements and testimony.
1970s
Technology is also understood through what its documents reveal
A history of technology need not simply line up inventions. Manuals, archives and studies let us ask which uses the sources describe—and where their certainty ends.
1980s
A storage medium cannot tell us, by itself, how a computer was used
A drive, a storage medium and the record that describes them are different kinds of evidence. Archival standards help distinguish them, but cannot reconstruct a domestic routine that the sources do not show.
