Communicating modernity : design, representation, and the making of the telephone
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is a cultural history of the telephone.It explores how the telephone came to be imagined, developed, promoted, and ultimately integrated into everyday life in the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.By drawing on a wide-range of archival materials-including artifacts, design documents, corporate correspondence, trade journals, consumer advertisements, and popular texts-the dissertation reveals how the design of the telephone acted as a site of negotiation for competing concepts of modernity and reflected the shifting power relations between inventors, managers, manufacturers, subscribers, engineers, designers, and advertising experts.It considers the earliest conceptions of the telephone system and shows how these visions-along with the material expansions of t h e telephone network-were profoundly bound up with the transformations of economic forces and social conditions which marked the shift from market to modern capitalism.Finally, the dissertation examines the role of telephone advertising in shaping and advancing new, 'modern' ways of thinking about time, space, and identity.Evidence is presented t o suggest that ongoing negotiations over the appearance, uses, and meanings of the telephone played a significant role both in shaping the social and political identity of America's emerging middle class and in defining popular understanding about what it meant to be 'modern.'iii
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".