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My research project examines the residual, dominant, and emergent practices and meanings of dictation in the decades bracketing the Second World War. Attending to Irish, British, and American materials, the project investigates the varied uses of dictation machines to combat political dictatorship during these years, an apparently contradictory relationship that finds material articulation in the uneasy and oftentimes suppressed interactions of recorded sound and the printed word. It centers on the nexus of dictation in three distinct phases within its overall time frame: ethnographic collecting as a function of state-formation in Ireland in the 30s and 40s; radio propaganda monitoring for the purpose of counter-propaganda broadcasting during the war; and programming innovations in radio features and drama at the British Broadcasting Corporation into the mid-50s. In each of these phases, the lineaments of dictation are manifested in specific forms that respond to particular contextual determinants; in conjunction, they adduce the movement of information between contingent institutional categories that have since become naturalized. During the war, dictation machines and the cylinder format moved from a state of semi-obsolescence to archaism, an historical juncture of obsolescence, innovation, and succession that played out in a political and institutional context marked by anxieties over the mechanisms of democratic polity and the rise and success of dictatorial forms of authority. Yet even after the superseding of the cylinder format, the practical and political dynamics to which their use responded and in which their use participated continued to be the dominant footing on which authoritarian and democratic dictation was known. By tracking three distinct instances of a wider phenomenon, the project aims for a fuller understanding of the disenchanting logic of rationalization and mimesis that underpins the field of dictation and of the institutional forms dependent on the dictational interaction of reproduced sound and printed pages. From a slaphappy present in which the movement of information has become mystifyingly synonymous with information itself, this project returns to the problematic of dictation.
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