1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 57.

2. Zephyr Frank, “Spatial History as Scholarly Practice,” 503.

3. Bethany Nowviskie, “Resistance in Materials,” 383.

4. This stems from Michel Foucault’s understanding of the apparatus (“dispositif”) and from Giorgio Agamben’s follow-up essay, in which he writes: “anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and—why not—language itself.” From Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus and Other Essays, 14.

5. Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice. Time, Agency and Science, 7.

6. Bruno Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise a World,” 160–161.

7. Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, 18–19. This is not to say that the current examples of Digital (Humanities) Labs would be anywhere so naïve; indeed, many of them are very aware of their proximity with “traditional” locations of old media such as the library. And many of the practices that revolve around the digital are embedded in a more pragmatic way of considering, for example, the benefits of open source systems around which the lab or digital scholarship can build itself as a different sort of a communication system. See Gillian Gilmer, “Interview with Kyle Bickoff.”

8. One broader term that indicates a commitment to articulate a continuum across material objects and information technologies is “post-digital.” What the term offers is a way to realize the multiple histories of digital technologies from 8bit sound and graphics to the current HD worlds. See Florian Cramer, “What is Post-Digital?”

9. Bruno Latour, “Give me a lab,” 161. See also Law, John. “Making A Mess with Method.” published by the Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN, UK, at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Making-a-Mess-with-Method.pdf. 3 March 2003.

10. Wershler et al, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.”

11. Media Archaeological Fundus.

12. Emerson, Lori. “Archives, Materiality, and ‘the agency of the machine’: An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.”

13. Lori Emerson, “Sister Labs.”

14. For a list of the objects, see the Fundus wiki at https://wikis.hu-berlin.de/maf/Kategorie:Inventar.

15. See Giuliana Bruno, “Film, Aesthetics, Science: Hugo Münsterberg’s Laboratory of Moving Images.”

16. Wershler et al, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.”

17. Wershler et al, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.”

18. Wershler et al, “Jessper Olson on the Media Archaeology Lab.”

19. As Wolfgang Hagen puts it, media devices restore parts of their own scientific history. Hagen, Das Radio. Zue Geschichte des Hörfunks—Deutschland/USA, xvii.

20. William Thomson, “Scientific Laboratories,” 411.

21. Wershler et al, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.”

22. Wershler et al, “An Interview with Emmanuel Guez.” The Minitel also serves as a prominent example. See, for example, Emmanuel Guez et al, “The Afterlives of Network-Based Artworks.” Their example is the lab-created afterlife for Eduardo Kac’s Videotext Poems from middle of the 1980s where the art piece becomes also a way to address the existence of earlier now dead media infrastructures such as the French minitel networking system: “ The most common Minitel could therefore be coupled to a telephone from the 1980s. To connect to the server the user needs to compose a number, wait for the high tone specific to a Minitel server, then press the button ‘Connexion/Fin’. This procedure, obvious to any Minitel user, is lost to the younger generation of digital natives’ yet experimental media archaeology allows a new audience to re-appropriate such knowledge and in this sense, although the Minitel is a dead medium, creating the ‘ second original’ has made it into a sort of ‘zombie’ medium, giving an archival life, or afterlife, to Kac’s Poems. Any happy Minitel owner with access to a landline can call the number linked to the micro-server and get connected.” (118).

23. Wershler et al, “Interview with Stefan Höltgen.”

24. See Stefan Höltgen , “Game Circuits: Platform Studies und Medienarchäologie als Methoden zur Erforschung von Computerspielen.”

25. Fred Turner connects this to the longer history of R&D in the US and the emergence of current forms of digital and internet based utopias as part of the developments since World War II. The story of modern valorization of information is also then a story of the emergent military-industrial-academic complex: “The idea that the material world could be thought of as an information system and modeled on computers emerged not with the Internet, but much earlier, in and around the government-sponsored research laboratories of World War II, and particularly around the Radiation Laboratory at MIT.” Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, 15.

26. Stewart Brand, Inventing the Future, 42.

27. Wershler et al, “Prototyping the Past: The Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria.”

28. See Garnet Hertz, “Dead Media Research Lab.” See also Siegfried Zielinski, “Modelling Media for Ignatius Loyola: A Case Study on Athanasius Kircher’s World Apparatus between the Imaginary and the Real.”

29. Jentery Sayers, “Prototyping the Past.”

30. Nina Belojevic, “Kits for Cultural History.” The “kit” also resonates strongly with some methods in critical design, like cultural probes, props, and scenarios. See Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

31. Jentery Sayers, “Kits for Cultural History: A Critical Essay.”

32. Andreas Fickers and Annie van der Oever, “Experimental Media Archaeology: A Plea for New Directions,” 275. See also Wershler et al, “Jesper Olsson on the Media Archaeology Lab.”

33. Lori Emerson, “Archives, Materiality and the ‘Agency of the Machine’: An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.” See also Florian Cramer, “Post-Digital Literary Studies.”

34. Ludwig, David, and Cornelia Weber. “A Rediscovery Of Scientific Collections As Material Heritage? The Case Of University Collections In Germany.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44.4 (2013): 652–659.

35. See for example Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine. See also Ludwig and Weber, “University Collections as Archives of Scientific Practice.”

36. Marta Lourenço, Between Two Worlds, 45. We would also like to point out that cabinets of physics instruments, models for anatomy, and all kinds of collections of ephemera offered what Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz called in 1787 “a sort of encyclopaedia for the senses” which was particularly useful for pedagogical purposes as well as for research (quoted in Walter Tega, “Science and art in Palazzo Poggi,” 8). In many ways, collections were also connected to spaces and architectures such as botanical gardens and anatomical theatres. Of course, in the humanities both archaeological and ethnological collections were already a central part of earlier research collections including a partial absorption into university museums. While in our case research collections are not necessarily serving the public like a museum—and in many cases because of limited or non-existent staffing or because of the nature of the lab or collection—it is useful to illuminate the importance of the collection by quoting David Murray from 1904: “Every Professor of a branch of science requires a museum and a laboratory for his department; and accordingly in all our great universities and other teaching institutions we have independent museums of botany, palaeontology, geology, mineralogy and zoology, of anatomy, physiology, pathology and materia medica, of archaeology—prehistorical and historical, classical and Christian—each subject taught having its own appropriate collection” (quoted in Lourenço, 68–69).

37. William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, 141.

38. Ibid, 160.

39. Ibid, 142.

40. Ibid, 174.

41. Jonathan Stern, “The Example: Some Historical Considerations,” 23.

42. On Kittler as the daunting godfather of Digital Humanities, see Susanne Holl, “Friedrich Kittler’s Digital Legacy—PART II—Friedrich Kittler and the Digital Humanities: Forerunner, Godfather, Object of Research. An Indexer Model Research.”

43. Schmidgen, “The Laboratory,” 11.

44. In addition to text-based work, reverse engineering and forensics are relevant methodologies for a kind of media-analytical research that approaches cultures of computation from a different perspective than that of data in the abstract. This is not meant as a dismissal of hybrid labs that focus on big data, or those that incorporate the old ideal of Big Science in the humanities lab. What we are arguing, though, is that the sort of material practice we have been describing is a necessary complement to data-based work as it frames the link between science and hybrid lab from the perspective of media studies instead of the media industry and the military-industrial complex.

45. Wershler et al, “An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.”

46. Winthrop-Young, Kittler and the Media, 74.

47. Charlotte Frost, “Media Lab Culture in the UK”.

48. Ibid.

49. For an online catalogue of the Media Archaeology Lab’s collection, please consult http://mediaarchaeologylab.com/catalogue/.

50. See Emerson, “The Media Archaeology Lab as Platform for Undoing and Reimagining Media History” and “Excavating, Archiving, Making Media Inscriptions // In and Beyond the Media Archaeology Lab.”

51. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, 100.

52. Peter Galison, “Trading Zones and Interactional Expertise,” 36. Thin description as defined by Peter Galison is part of his concept of trading zones for interdisciplinary activity.

53. See the Digital Archive of entries at https://interactions.acm.org/archive/.

54. “Day in the Lab: Austin Center for Design” ACM Interactions, May + June 2013, https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2013/austin-center-for-design.

55. “Day in the Lab: Interactive Product Design Lab (IPDL) at Georgia Tech” ACM Interactions March + April 2012, https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/march-april-2012/interactive-product-design-lab-ipdl-at-georgia-tech1.

56. “Day in the Lab: Game Innovation Lab, NYU-Poly” ACM Interactions September + October 2012. https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/september-october-2012/game-innovation-lab-nyu-poly

57. “Day in the Lab: Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab” ACM Interactions September + October 2011 https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/september-october-2011/the-champaign-urbana-community-fab-lab1.

58. Karen Barad uses the term intra-action to emphasize the nature of agency always not merely as interactional; instead, intra-action emphasizes the fluid boundaries in which different agencies co-constitute each other, including the entanglement of matter and meaning in iterative rounds of engagement: “The neologism “intra-action” signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action. It is important to note that the “distinct” agencies are only distinct in a relational, not an absolute, sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements.” Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 33.