Cultural Biographies and Excavations of Media: Context and Process

Abstract

This article reviews and compares historical approaches to the study of digital media. Its focus is an examination of how biographical methods for the study of media and the research tradition known as media archaeology can be usefully combined as part of a research methodology for the study of media software. After introducing Igor Kopytoff's concept of the cultural biography of things, I assess how some scholars have applied this concept to the study of the domestication of media technologies in everyday life. I argue that such research deploys a particular type of historical construction of the media and its contexts in order to frame its cultural biographies. The following section details how this approach encounters a number of challenges when applied to digital media. In order to address this problem, the latter sections of the article detail how some media archaeological research methods may function as a helpful complement to the initial approach.