UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Scanner Epistemologies: Mediations of the Material and Virtual Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5qp8v3zs Author Le, Lan Xuan Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Scanner Epistemologies: Mediations of the Material and Virtual A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Film & Media Studies by Lan Xuan Le Committee In Charge Professor Lisa Parks, Chair Professor Charles Wolfe Professor Greg Siegel Professor Rita Raley June 2017 The dissertation of Lan Xuan Le is approved. ______________________________________________ Charles Wolfe ______________________________________________ Greg Siegel ______________________________________________ Rita Raley ______________________________________________ Lisa Parks, Committee Chair June 2017 Scanner Epistemologies: Mediations of the Material and Virtual Copyright © 2017 by Lan Xuan Le iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee members for their support of my work. iv VITAE OF LAN XUAN LE June 2017 EDUCATION Bachelor of Arts in Biology and Asian Studies, Swarthmore College, 2004 Masters of Public Health, Boston University, 2007 Masters of Science in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009 Doctor of Philosophy in Film & Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, January 2017 (expected) PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT 2010-2016: Teaching Assistant, Department of Film & Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara PUBLICATIONS Le, Lan X. 2016. “The Barcode Network: The Material of Informatics.” Convergence: the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. (In Review) Osterweil, S. & Le, L. X. 2010. “Learning and Change - A View from MIT’s Education Arcade.” Cognitive Technology Journal. 14(2): 58-65. AWARDS 2016, Mellichamp Global Studies Graduate Research Fellow, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA. 2015–16, UC Humanities Research Institute Graduate Working Group Award, UC Irvine, Irvine, CA. Graduate Student Organizer 2012–13 Dibner History of Science Fellow, Huntington Library, Pasadena, CA. Awarded to support archival research for advanced scholars. 2009–13, Chancellor’s Fellow, Humanities Division (1-award/year), UC Santa Barbara, CA. 5-year fellowship awarded to support promising incoming scholar. v ABSTRACT Scanner Epistemologies: Mediations of the Material and Virtual by Lan Xuan Le Across many everyday contexts and technological devices, we encounter over and over again a mechanical-translation act called scanning, performed by flatbed scanners, photocopiers, barcode readers, televisions, x-ray airport security scanners, fax machines, retinal eye scanning, MRI scanning, ultra-sonography, and earth-orbiting satellite imaging. What all of these separate devices have in common is the same core technological mechanism and mode of action—the mapping of differences along a surface to be known by a lensless apparatus that detects via probe-signals. Despite being mobilized to very different uses and within a large diversity of networks and media assemblages, scanners arise from a common genealogical source—the conceptual union of photography to telegraphy. Scanners appear everywhere in our modern infrastructure. It is impossible to avoid these devices, as they mediate even the most basic transactions in everyday life, such as purchasing food at the grocery store or checking out a book at a college library. Yet neither historians of technology nor media scholars have addressed this quotidian device which enables so much of modern bureaucracy in business, government and education to function. While the scanner’s absence from the landscape of critical thought precisely marks the problem of the unremarkable in vi our scholarship, the metaphor of scanning remains present in both common and scholarly discourse. Scanning may, at various times, stand in for a model of attention, a form of reading, or serve as a simile for searching and/or diagnosing. The imagination of the scan well precedes its appearance as a technology, which further indicates the necessity of understanding this unexamined medium. This dissertation project investigates the object of the scanner as a term for organizing the imagination and materialization of an entire suite of technologies that we encounter daily. Conceived as a social history of technology married to a film and media studies paradigm, this dissertation examines the scanner as a form of machine-perception that, while it extends the dominant conception of the camera-prosthesis, stands as its own unique model of perceptual mediation. The scanner remains unique in media studies because so much of its identity depends upon the place it holds within the historical conditions of the intermedial assemblage in which it has been mobilized. Through a series of case studies in which I loosely divide scanning technologies into genres of perceptual and epistemological function, I triangulate the epistemic role of the scanner in each of its respective media networks. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1 – Television Before TV: Scanner Technologies & the Origins of Images-at- 35 a-Distance Chapter 2 – Material Histories of Visualization: Particle Accelerators and the 69 Epistemologies of Discovery Chapter 3 – The Material of Information: an Intermedial History of Barcode Scanning 104 and the Genesis of Automated Identification and Data Collection Chapter 4 – Archiving the Gesture: Motion Tracking and Scanning at the Limits 152 Conclusion 188 References 198 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Diagram of Frank Gray's 1928 direct scan model . 53 Figure 2. Conceptual diagram of how a scanner operates . 72 Figure 3. Diagram of a particle accelerator . 76 Figure 4. Illustration of a spinthariscope . 90 Figure 5. Photograph of scintillations within a spinthariscope . .91 Figure 6. An Atomic Energy Lab toy kit . 93 Figure 7. Barcodes . 107 Figure 8. The Barcode Building . 112 Figure 9. How a barcode scanner works . 115 Figure 10. Barcode vocabulary . 124 Figure 11. Woodland and Silver 1952 patent diagram for first barcode scanner . 125 Figure 12. Diagram of scans involved in Amazon package reaching customer . 140 ix Introduction The earliest known use of the word “scan” in the English language was in 1398: the verb, “to scan,” meant “to mark up poetry for recitation.”1 Scanning thus began its conceptual life as a process of ephemeral inscription, of analytical judgment in relation to textual practices. By approximately 1550, the verb would take on a new meaning. It would mean to “criticize; to test or estimate the correctness or value of; to judge by a certain rule or standard.” This notion of scanning as an evaluative form would lead into its subsequent meaning, “to examine, consider, or discuss minutely.”2 A scanner became “one who scans or examines critically.” This human-centered usage denoted a person who was capable of deciphering the smallest details that escaped others, searching almost in a forensic mode. Over the years, to scan also came to variously mean to perceive, to interpret or assign meaning, or to search or examine in a searching manner with the eyes. These somewhat rare definitions of scanning are no longer in use today, but nonetheless haunt the modern understanding of scanning, especially the notion of perception and the assignation of meaning. Eventually, scanning would come to mean looking over a text quickly with one’s eyes. Not until 1927 would the term scanner come to be associated with a scanning machine, “any device for scanning or examining all parts of something.”3 Once scanning became the function of a machine, the changing definition of the verb “to scan” remained concerned with the act of examination, scrutiny and the attendant issues that come with such an endeavor. Although visual practices of scanning preceded the invention of the scanner, the process of scanning remains involved in seeking out differences and making distinctions. 1 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Scan.” 2Ibid. 3 Ibid 1 This project studies the unique mediating process of machine scanning and the role it plays in today’s media ecology. Serving as a relay point in larger systems of media, scanners act as an interface that transforms material objects into virtual information. The scanner serves various functions, such as visualization, verification, and detection of objects, through the mechanism of measurement and quantification. When understood as its own mediating process, an examination of scanning reveals a buried set of ideological and epistemological functions that serve larger systems of command and control. By examining the process of scanning through a critical media studies paradigm, the following four chapters uncover the ways in which the mediating process of scanning shapes communication and the parameters of what can and cannot be known. In this project, I define scanning as a process of social and technical measurement that orbits at all times a machine nucleus called the scanner. This machine has taken on many guises over time, and its changes in form, and adaptation to its environment, have in turn shaped the process of scanning in each iteration. For this reason, the machine remains a necessary part of the definition of scanning as the function of scanning has become progressively