I have a new book coming out this month with Tapir Academic Press, edited together with Helen Jøsok Gansmo and Thomas Berker, two good colleagues from my former university. The book is titled “Norske hytter i endring – om bærekraft og behag” and is a collection of articles about the Norwegian leisure cabin. We wished to explore the many facets of contemporary cabin lifestyles and their historical roots by looking at the interplay between nature, society, leisure, and technology. While the editors all have a background in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), the book has contributors from a range of fields, including history, sociology, architecture, and literature studies.

Swarm Scholarship

The idea for the book came out of a workshop that I arranged in 2009, where a group of researchers visited a big leisure cabin trade fair in Trondheim to observe, interview, and gather data. When organizing the workshop I was heavily influenced by Josh Greenberg’s idea of “swarm scholarship” from 2007. I see now that Social Identity published a theme issue on swarm scholarship and methodology in 2009, just a few months after our workshop – it looks very interesting, but since the articles are behind a paywall and none of the universities I’m affiliated with subscribe to this journal, it’s hard for me to actually look at them. The method worked quite well for us, where we met for discussion both before and after going to the trade show, as well as live blogging about our observations (in Norwegian and Danish only, sorry). I did also write up a blog post on swarm scholarship that I posted to forskning.no,  the Nordic countries’ largest online news service covering Norwegian and international research (I think the blog had approximately 180,000 unique visitors every month at the time).

I think the most interesting result of the workshop was the feeling of working together on exploring something in an academic context. We spend far too much time alone with our own ideas (or lack thereof), so I greatly enjoy working with others.

Table of contents

Hyttedrømmen mellom hjem, fritid og natur
Thomas Berker, Helen Jøsok Gansmo og Finn Arne Jørgensen

«Det egentlige Norge» – hytter i norsk litteratur, ca. 1814–2005
Ellen Rees

Den første hyttekrisa. Samfunnsplanlegging, naturbilder og
Allmenningens tragedie
Finn Arne Jørgensen

Drømmen om det enkle liv – et grunnlag for mer bærekraftig hyttekultur? 
Eli Støa, Bendik Manum og Margrethe Aune

Med barn på hytta – energikrevende rekreasjon
Tove Krogstad Johnsen

Hyttemobilitet som kulturfenomen 
Knut Hidle og Winfried Ellingsen

Hyttebruk og miljø: en arena for nøysomhet eller overforbruk?
Carlo Aall

Frihet i ei lita hytte? Energiforbrukets sosiotekniske aktører 
Helen Jøsok Gansmo og Thomas Berker

Hytter og vernet fjellnatur. Status, problemer og mulige løsninger 
Einar Stamnes

Bærekraftig urbanisering? Endringer i den norske hyttekulturen 
Thomas Berker og Helen Jøsok Gansmo

Hurtigruten comes to my hometown Sortland, June 20, 3:30am. Midnight sun to the right.

I have come to the conclusion that I like my entertainment slow. I generally don’t watch TV, but the last few days I have been glued to the TV, watching the 8048-minute long live broadcast of Hurtigruten sailing from Bergen to Kirkenes, along the Norwegian coast. As you might expect, the show is very slow – we get to see the view from the ship, mixed in with interviews and commentaries onboard the ship, all in realtime. The TV station NRK2 shows everything live (and I get it through my cable TV here in Sweden), and a website shows the video stream with a good map and other information (more on the website below).

The show has been a big hit in Norway – some 1.3 million people (of Norway’s roughly 5 million people) watched the show Thursday and Friday, which are quite impressive numbers, and I expect the weekend ratings will be even higher. The hashtag #hurtigruten has been quite active on Twitter as well. I’m not surprised that people are watching the show, but it’s been even more interesting to see all the people that show up along the coast, waving from land, cruising around in boats, and also the huge crowds at all the stops. The small places are generally the ones with the most people. My hometown Sortland (with 10,000 inhabitants), for instance, had more people show up at 3:30 at night than Trondheim (with 175,000 people) had in the middle of day. It seems like the experience of the show took people somewhat by surprise – the premise sounds quite ludicrous, like watching paint dry on live TV, but people took a look out of pure curiosity and then found it hard to stop. Twitter is full of people who seemed unable to turn off the TV and go to bed at night as Hurtigruten sailed through Vesterålen in the midnight sun.

I think there are many reasons why the Hurtigruten show stuck a chord in Norway. One of them has to do with history and nature. The infrastructural role of Hurtigruten as a critical means of transportation is long past. Once upon a time it was essential for bringing people, mail, and goods in a reliable way along the coast. It still brings cargo and people, of course, but today there are many other options available. Like many old technologies, Hurtigruten has found new life in new roles. More than anything else, Hurtigruten is a tourist ship now. But I think the show also demonstrates that Hurtigruten has become a part of the cultural landscape of coastal Norway and a way of experiencing and taking part in nature.

English-language trailer for the Hurtigruten show.

What can we say about this new genre of travel TV? Is it really a form of Baudrillardian simulacra, of mediated consumer culture imitating the real world? What is the relationship between the experience of being aboard Hurtigruten, experiencing nature first-hand, and watching it on TV? Right now I think of it as a form of augmented reality, a communal experience that adds to the physical experience. It may be mediated, but there is also something profound and tremendously powerful at work here (I hesitate to call it authentic, but perhaps I should).

The Hurtigruten show is a fantastic experience, culturally immersive and able to bring the entire country together in a way that few other TV programs have. But it is important to note that it is without the instant gratification of so much contemporary entertainment. In a way, it can be compared to the slow food movement. It is slow entertainment, meant to be stretched out and savored. In fact, I have seen several comment that NRK should go even slower, take out the interviews and documentaries, and just stick with the slowly changing landscapes as the ship progresses along the coast. I agree wholeheartedly.

Digital technologies and mediated environments

Now, in order to justify watching this show at work (and then taking the time to write a blog post about it) I want to highlight some possible lessons for environmental historians, digital humanists, and others in academia.

The Hurtigruten video feed and map interface running on my office computer

The last year I have been thinking much about the intersections between environmental history and the digital humanities. In what ways can digital technologies help us think about and analyze historical environments in new ways? How can we understand the new forms of storytelling that arise around mapping technologies (which I briefly blogged about before)? I’m involved in large a collaborative project between Umeå University and Stanford University project called Media Places, where we wish to explore the notion of mediated places in a broad sense. I want to use this project as a platform to look at the creation and mediation of natural sites and environments, and the Hurtigruten show seems to me a good example of this.

NRK's website for the Hurtigruten show

I think the website that NRK made for the show represents a great model for visualizing travel. As we see above, the site has three main elements: 1) a zoomable map with a red line marking the progress of Hurtigruten and markers for all the stops along the way. 2) a video window showing a live or archived video stream. Clicking anywhere along the red line on the map will show you the video for that spot. 3) a info window that shows you information about Hurtigruten, radar data, links to torrent downloads of raw video data in full HD (CC-licensed), and a link to a 3D view in Google Earth.

Zoomed in map showing the course of Hurtigruten outside Sortland. Every dot on the red line represents a data point that one can click to view the video stream from there.

Using Google Maps, NRK has created a nice interface for following a journey in time and space. Two years ago I presented a paper at the American Society for Environmental History conference where I attempted to recreate the strenuous and time-consuming journey from Bergen to the Vøringsfossen waterfall in the late 1800s, one of the big, scenic tourist attractions at the time. If I had more experience with the Google Maps API I could probably create a website that would trace this journey and visualize it. Using layers, I could compare the route and speed for different points in time, such as 1900, 1950, and 2000, to get a feeling of the changing experience of space and distance. I think we have much to do in exploring other forms of narratives, of presenting and analyzing environmental history.

Hurtigruten leaving Bergen, linked to 3D view in Google Earth

On the fringes of commercial services

We have several examples of similar experiments in mapping and storytelling. First, we have the predecessor to the Hurtigruten show, when NRK followed the Bergensbanen railroad from Oslo to Bergen, in realtime. After the show, NRK released a torrent with a 246 GB HD file (!), or a compressed 720p file at 22GB (which is still big enough to make things complicated) and encouraged mashups. 1.2 million Norwegians watched parts of the show, which was later released as a DVD.

Bergenbanen at Finse (where the Hoth scenes of The Empire Strikes Back were shot)

Second, Google also made a railroad visualization, in a slightly different way, for the Transsiberian Railroad from Moscow to Vladivostok.

Google's Transsiberian Railroad, Moscow - Vladivostok.

Third, many may know Google and NORAD’s Santa Tracker, which tracks Santa flying across the globe at Christmas.

The Santa Tracker

I was thrilled to get the chance to go to an exhibit on the Frankfurter Kitchen and modern kitchen design at MoMA in New York recently. The exhibit was called “Counter Space” – here’s a link to the exhibit website.

Back in the day (more specifically, from 1999 to 2001) I wrote my master’s thesis on the debate over “the scientific kitchen” in Norway, 1900-1940, and the Frankfurter kitchen was a huge influence on this discussion (the thesis is available in fulltext here). I looked at how many well-to-do women who had previously had a maid increasingly needed to take over the housework themselves at the beginning of the 1900s. Being a maid was hard work, and many young women chose to instead seek work in the rapidly growing small-scale industry in Norway. Good maids suddenly were hard to come by. As a result, the modern Norwegian housewife came into being. They sought to not only make housework easier, but also to increase the status of the work in the home. The home was a workplace like any other. Nowhere was that more obvious than in the kitchen.

The international home economics movement attempted to improve the kitchen and make the work that took place there more rational. Margarete Schütte-Lihotsky designed a kitchen based on the ideals laid out by Christine Frederick and the home economics movement in the 1920s. The kitchen was intended to be affordable, efficient, and suitable for mass production.

The Frankfurt kitchen has become an iconic representation of the modern kitchen as laboratory. Inspired by ideas of efficiency and scientific management (also known as Taylorism), this kitchen is a great example of how knowledge and technologies circulate between producers and consumers, between factories and the home. The women who worked to promote scientific homekeeping had great hopes for the kitchen as a liberating space for women, a place where women could become part of modern society.

Some of the same ideals underpinned the famous Nixon-Khrushchev (sp.) kitchen debate in 1959, a recurring topic in a recent (and quite good) book on Cold War kitchens that I reviewed for Technology and Culture last year. In this TV-broadcast meeting of the two head-of-states, the high-tech kitchen on display in the American National Exhibition in Moscow came to represent the virtues of American technology.

It was a kitchen made at a time with a strong optimism and belief in science and technology. We can see some of the same story at work in the fantastic Norwegian movie, “Kitchen Stories,” from 2003. The trailer below (and the movie itself) is definitely worth seeing.

However, the result of all this activity in the kitchen between 1900 and 1960 is far from clear-cut. Yes, the kitchen is far more advanced and far more ergonomic, but as Ruth Schwarz Cowan’s classic study in history of technology shows, changing expectations of what a home should be actually made “more work for mother.”

All in all, the MoMA exhibit gave a very fascinating insight into this particular moment in time, where modern science and technology promised to transform the home. As a historian of technology, I enjoyed seeing the physical artifacts themselves, rather than just pictures reproduced in a book. I love teaching classes about the changing kitchen of the 20th century, and I definitely have some new material for this now.

All photos in this post by Finn Arne Jørgensen, released under a CC-BY License.

There has been some uproar the last few days about the spatial data embedded in the iPhone backups – which has been transmitted to Apple. Since Alexis Madrigal asked to see other people’s maps, out of curiosity, here’s mine. I used the free iPhone Tracker software made by Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden to generate these maps.

World Map

Here is my world map. As we can see, I spend most of my time in Northern Europe, but I’ve had several stops in the US. Of course, the data set is limited to the time since I bought my iPhone, which was about 8-9 months ago.

The US

Looking closer at the US part, we see that I’ve been to Chicago, Seattle, Phoenix, and Santa Fe since buying my phone. Chicago sticks out as a pretty small dot – I have stopped at O’Hare a while flying to Phoenix and Seattle and must have turned on my phone. I did fly through Newark a few days ago, but must not have turned on the phone then, since it did not show on the map.

New Mexico

As we zoom in on New Mexico, we see clearly how the data points map out on a grid, and one might reasonably think that I did not physically go to all these locations. Supposedly, the iPhone found the location by triangulating to nearby cell phone towers. It seems like I spent much more time in Albuquerque (south) than in Santa Fe (north), which is not true at all. We flew to Albuquerque, but only spent one day there. The rest of the time we were in Santa Fe. One day we drove out to Bandelier National Monument, which we can also see to the northwest of the map.

Phoenix

Zooming in on Phoenix, we see two concentrations on the map. I assume the darkest dot is around the Wyndham Hotel, and going east we can see the results of our very interesting bus ride to the Phoenix Zoo (reminder to self: taking the bus in the US is something entirely different than in Northern Europe…) Further up we can see a big concentration of dots around Taliesin West. Interestingly, one can’t really see the drive out there.

Europe

Jumping over to Europe, we see much traveling back and forth between northern Norway and Sweden, and big dots for Stockholm and Oslo, and smaller dots for Roskilde and Florence.

Northern Norway and Sweden

This is where it gets interesting. Here we see the results of our road trips between Umeå, Trondheim, and Mosjøen.

Umeå

Finally, a zoomed in map of Umeå, the city I live in. The grid is very obvious here, and the size of the dots do not accurately indicate where I’ve spent the most time (campus and my house). Instead, I think they must represent the cell phone antenna towers that register my phone the most often, and some of these must be bigger and more sensitive than others.

I like the stories that these maps tell. They also made me think of the way geotagging and mapping technologies have transformed our personal relationships to space. I wish that I had tagged every single one of the some 30,000 photos I have taken since I bought my first digital camera in the summer of 2004 (a Nikon D70, which I still use!) in time and space. I use Flickr and, increasingly, Picasaweb to share and make cloud backups of my photos, and both these services now have the option to display geotagged photos on maps. Flickr certainly seems like the best solution, since they can show all geotagged locations on a big map:

My (all too few) geotagged photos on flickr.com

Here the map becomes a real tool for exploring places.

Picasaweb, on the other hand, only gives a tiny, cursory option to see all photo locations on a tiny little map:

Tiny Picasaweb world map

To see more detail, you need to look at individual albums:

Picasaweb individual album

Here we see again a map from our New Mexico trip. Not all that different from the iPhone generated one above.

I think personal mapping like this is still somewhat underexplored. Most advanced smartphones automatically geotag photos taken with them now, and I see that some compact digital cameras have started getting built-in GPS receivers. What will happen when all photos we take are reliably geotagged? As the last few days’ Apple controversy has demonstrated, there will be some privacy issues, but I think it holds the potential for some real exciting personal mapping services.

In the wealthy part of the Western world, we have come to think about recycling and resource reclamation as a something that is handled by anonymous technologies, more or less automatically, as long as we as consumers manage to put it in the right bin. Over at the always excellent The Atlantic, Adam Minter has been writing a series of posts called Wasted 7/7, which explores how much of the actual work of American recycling has been shipped abroad to Asia, where much of the labor is done by manual workers. This story can of course be told in many ways – for instance, one where the West ships its garbage to less developed parts of the world, which then have to struggle with pollution, health concerns, and labor inequalities and exploitation. And while there certainly is something to this interpretation (think, for instance of the stories of shipbreaking in India and Bangladesh), Minter wanted to draw our attention to another version of the story: “This is what happens when automobile-loving societies reach living standards so high that they can’t afford to take apart their old cars by hand anymore in order to recycle them.” Because of the surplus of cheap labor in parts of Asia, it is possible for scrap to get “recycled completely, providing a relatively clean alternative to mined, virgin materials,” and still be profitable (which is key to making business do anything green). Minter argues that China is “desperate to show environmental leadership” and that labor conditions actually are much better than one would think.

Chinese Metal Breaker. Photo from The Atlantic.

Minter tells an interesting story about how materials flow back and forth across the world. For instance, Minter notes that “recycled metal currently accounts for 25% of Chinese aluminum production, 40% of copper production, and 15% of steel production.” This gets shipped back to the US and elsewhere as part of new products. China’s scrap recycling industry has evolved into a “critical supplier of raw materials to respected manufacturers of iPhones, PCs, automobile engines, and other precision manufactured high-tech products.” In the end, Minter turns the exploitation story on its head:  “I simply can’t escape the feeling that the people being exploited are the Americans sending all that value to China.”

All in all, this is certainly worth reading. Minter is working on a book on the topic, which I am looking forward to seeing!

Here are links to all the posts in the series:

1. The Motor Breakers of China
2. The Plastics Shredders of China
3. The Metal Shredders of Toyota
4. The Metal Sorters of Shanghai
5. The Metal Sorters North of Mumbai
6. The Shipbreakers of China
7. The Chinese Sample Room

Cans Recycled. Image used with kind permission of Jostein Skeidsvoll

This weekend I visited Lilla Galleriet in Umeå, where photographer Jostein Skeidsvoll opened his exhibit on “Cans Recycled: The Visual Power of Invisible Things”. I saw the advertisement in the newspaper and was intrigued by his description of how he was suddenly captured by the hidden beauty of a crushed beverage can. He had spent the last year taking pictures of crushed empty cans that he had found as litter. I met Jostein at the gallery and it turned out that he was a fellow Norwegian! So we had a long and interesting conversation in Norwegian about beverage container recycling, garbage as art, and on being a Norwegian in Sweden. I bought a print of the picture above – the colors are much more vibrant in the real print. I liked the colors and composition of this particular picture, and also that it was the only one of his pictures where you could see the “Pant” or deposit symbol, indicating that if the can’s original consumer had returned it in a reverse vending machine, he or she would have gotten a 50 öre deposit back and the can would have been recycled to get new life, most likely as a new can. But instead, the can became trash until Jostein saw its beauty and turned it into art. There are many ways to appreciate trash!

Last night David Roberts (@drgrist) tweeted “We think of solar, wind, & geothermal as power generation. Instead we should think of them as energy infrastructure. Discuss.” Even though this was right before my bedtime, I replied that “As a historian of tech & environment, I would say that we should think of all energy in terms of infrastructure of prod. and use.” He followed up by asking “What would that mean in terms of policy?” While I made an attempt to reply on Twitter this morning, I think I need to write something more extensive to come up with a proper answer.

Historians of technology have done much excellent work on energy infrastructures and technological change, notably Thomas P. Hughes, but I would also like to mention Arne Kaijser (professor at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology and former president of the Society for the History of Technology). We can learn much from the studies that have been done in this field

First, solar, wind, and geothermal energy can’t be discussed as if they were freestanding energy sources; we need to see them as alternatives to an established and entrenched energy system. Such systems do not change without resistance – political, cultural, material, or organizational. Hughes calls this momentum, we can also call it a combination of vested interests and the obduracy of the built environment. Fossil fuels are extremely entrenched, which is why it is so hard to transition to renewable energy sources. This not just due to ill will from the oil companies’ side. Past energy choices are built into our everyday lives, our cities, our transport infrastructure – everything. Changing the energy infrastructure of a city – a nation of cities – is no small task. Alexis Madrigal argued something along the same lines a few weeks ago, when he said that “your city – pretty much wherever it is – was built for a climate that it may no longer have.” “Cities will have to get less efficient and more resilient. Redundancies will have to be built into systems that previously seemed to work just fine. This is how climate change will cost us all money.” Green energy infrastructures should certainly be part of this discussion.

Second, we need to think of energy not just in terms of production (though it certainly matters) but also of consumption, of the actual situations where consumers, corporations, and others make their specific energy choices. This is also a mode of analysis that comes from the history of technology. Ruth Schwartz Cowan called this the consumption junction, “the place and time at which the consumer makes choices between competing technologies.” From this point of view it is possible to see all the different factors that influence consumer choice at specific points in time. (Cowan, 263)

I have thought much about this in writing my own book on the infrastructure of beverage container recycling – one of the most common environmentalist actions people do in the Western world. In other words, how can our understanding of technological change help us understand – and support – environmental actions?

Just like energy, the choice to recycle should not be understood simply as an individual action, but needs to be seen as part of a larger socio-technical infrastructure. People will generally not recycle when it is inconvenient and where the effect is hard to see. Why recycle an empty bottle when there is no deposit and the recycling station is in an out-of-the-way location? Some people have enough ideological motivation to do so, but the recycling rate is never very high in such systems. Other places, however, where most beverage containers carry a deposit and are returned at the point of purchase, in reverse vending machines in grocery stores, reach extremely high recycling rates (90-99%, depending on material type, in Norway and Sweden).

So to come back to Cowan’s point and look at the consumption junction: Why choose green energy if it is more difficult and more expensive? Why drive an electric car if you can’t find charging stations when you need it? When you’re just trying to get through the day, getting the kids to and from daycare, through the daily commute, going to the grocery store, in the famous “time squeeze“, why should you (or how can you possibly) go out of your way to be green? Offering environmentally friendly products, services, and infrastructures for such situations should be a great business opportunity. And policy should support it in any possible way.

References
Cowan, Ruth Schwarz, “The Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of Technology” in Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch. The Social Construction of Technological Systems. New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 261-280.

Hughes, Thomas P, Networks of Power. Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)

Jørgensen, Finn Arne, Making a Green Machine. The Infrastructure of Beverage Container Recycling (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011)

Reworking my dissertation into a real book, published with a real, international university press, has been a long and sometimes frustrating process, but it is very satisfying to pass all the little milestones leading up to the actual publication. Today I discovered that the book is now listed on Amazon, so it is possible to preorder it here: Making a Green Machine: The Infrastructure of Beverage Container Recycling (I will get a referral bonus if you purchase it through this link!)

One step closer, in other words… The actual publication date is June 20, 2011 – hopefully everything will proceed on schedule. I still need to go through the final page proofs and make an index, which should happen not too long after the new year.