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Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

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Operative TV: Audiovisual Closed-Circuits from the Military to the Classroom, 1930s-1990s

Research Project  | 1 Project Members

From video surveillance to online teaching, from drone warfare, highway management to telemedicine: closed-circuit images take up multiple spaces today. Despite being quotidian, their history remains largely unknown. Operative TV's goal is to fill this gap by providing the first ever study of audiovisual closed-circuits in the longue durée. It scrutinizes the closed-circuits' diversity between the 1930s and the 1990s and develops case studies from the USA, France, the UK, Germany, and Switzerland - countries crucial for the development of closed-circuits and providing access to resources for writing the history of a medium whose images were conceived as instruments rather than representations.Distributed under Industrial Television and CCTV (for closed-circuit television), the systems were developed in Europe and the USA mainly by enterprises active in televisual R&D (i.e., RCA, Grundig, and many more). In their most basic organization, they connected a camera with a monitor by cable; more sophisticated designs allowed for the video recording of content or bi-directional conversation. While CCTV today stands as a synonym of the surveillance camera, its historical applications were at least as heterogeneous as contemporary closed-circuits and used on factory floors and in nuclear plants, in hospitals and schools. In this study, subproject (SP) 2 focuses on surveillance operations. However, Operative TV also emphasizes televisual practices beyond the surveillance framework and the closed-circuit's embeddedness in multiple institutional spaces. In lieu of using a narrow definition of what I call audiovisual closed-circuits (AVCC), I comprehend AVCC as a flexible and pluriform system: its applicability beyond the surveillance camera paradoxically stems from its closed design. Drawing upon multinational archival research, Operative TV examines two main hypotheses. First, it posits that the analysis of television in industrial, educational, and military contexts cannot be based on habitual analytical categories such as texts or spectators. Instead, AVCC necessitates a methodological shift towards an understanding of audiovisual production as a chain of operations that allows analyzing the entanglement of human and non-human actors. AVCC's usefulness indeed was contingent on the interplay of heterogeneous elements including operators, screens, infrastructures, and images: their interdependence, rather than the isolated components, should form the core of a historical enquiry. Second, Operative TV argues that the history of AVCC, an analog-electronic technology, nourishes a media archaeology of the digital. AVCC emerged at the same moment as digital computers; it coexisted and sometimes converged with digital machines. Before the computer definitively took over factory and office floors, television was used as a tool for operations ranging from targeting to instructing: analyzing AVCC's alleged "universality" (Journal d'Yverdon 1955) allows to better understand the emergence of our digital society. To discuss these two hypotheses, the project introduces an original framework drawing upon recent media theory, and looks more specifically at four operations performed by AVCC (SP 1 to 4). In addition to the operation of surveilling (SP 2), targeting (SP 1) was a central - and first - function of closed-circuits from the 1930s on; automating the workplace and instructing students (SP 3 & 4) were other tasks performed by AVCC in the postwar years. Sustained by complex human-machines ecologies, these operations would rapidly be executed by digital computers: before their digitization, they were the realm of analog TV.

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Improving the visibility of Equatorial Guinea as a Spanish-speaking country

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

Background: Equatorial Guinea presents an exceptional research field within the studies of the Spanish language. Geographically located in southern Africa, on the equator, in the Gulf of Guinea, it is today the only Hispanophone country in Africa (except for the politically sensitive case of Western Sahara) and thus offers a completely unique view of the world language Spanish, complementary to Europe and America. Despite this outstanding position, Equatorial Guinea still occupies a marginal status in studies on the dialectology, history, sociolinguistics and language contacts of Spanish. Although some important authors in the field of Spanish linguistics, such as De Granda, Quilis, Casado-Fresnillo or Lipski, have dedicated part of their work to Equatorial Guinea, modern publications are rare, which is why knowledge of the Equatoguinean variety of Spanish is still fragmentary. Its invisibility in studies about Spanish is intensified by a widespread lack of knowledge and consciousness about this only Hispanophone country in southern Africa and a still dominantly European view on African realities based on (post)colonial stereotypes, evaluations and hierarchizations. In fact, the general knowledge about Equatorial Guinea within the Spanish-speaking world is very incomplete, which is particularly surprising in the case of Spain, since Equatorial Guinea only gained its independence from Spain just over 50 years ago (1968).


Overall aim of the project: This research project aims at filling the existing research gap about Equatorial Guinea and at improving its visibility as part of the global Hispanophone world. Modern research data will be provided and critical questions answered, to show its relevance for Hispanic studies and to overcome traditional images about Equatorial Guinea and its Spanish, often perceived as a "peripheric", "incomplete", "incorrect", "exceptional" or "non-standard" variety.


Objectives, methods and expected results: The main part of this research project focuses on dialectological and sociolinguistic data collection in Equatorial Guinea (both on the island of Bioko and on mainland Río Muni). Its objective is to generate modern dialectological and sociolinguistic descriptions of Spanish in Equatorial Guinea through the collection and analysis of sociolinguistic guideline interviews and linguistic tests and questionnaires. The interview transcripts will constitute the first modern and digital corpus of spoken Equatoguinean Spanish. Sociolinguistic analyses on language perception, attitudes and ideologies will be possible; and the digital analyses of specific linguistic features combined with the results from the tests and questionnaires will allow to elaborate modern dialectological descriptions on different linguistic levels. Classical summaries about Equatoguinean Spanish in linguistic manuals can be revised and completed, and an answer can be given to the important question about the internal (diatopic, diastratic, diaphasic, ethnic) homogeneity or diversity of Equatoguinean Spanish. Furthermore, this Equatoguinean corpus can be compared with existing interviews with Equatoguineans in Madrid, Spain (habilitation project S. Schlumpf-Thurnherr).


Impact: The proposed project offers multiple and diverse views on Equatorial Guinea, raises awareness about its importance within the linguistic research community and in Equatorial Guinea itself, and contributes considerably to the knowledge about and the visibilization of this unique Hispanophone country in Africa.