Coding and Representation from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Scrambled Messages

An exploration of trends and cultures connected to electrical telegraphy and recent digital communications, this collection emerges from the research project Scrambled Messages: The Telegraphic Imaginary 1866–1900, which investigated cultural phenomena relating to the 1866 transatlantic telegraph. It interrogates the ways in which society, politics, literature and art are imbricated with changing communications technologies, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Contributors consider control, imperialism and capital, as well as utopianism and hope, grappling with the ways in which human connections (and their messages) continue to be shaped by communications infrastructures.

Anne Chapman researches the interplay of cultural and social forms in the nineteenth and early twentieth century with interests in periodical culture, short fiction and the confluence of the visual and the verbal. She teaches at Glasgow Caledonian University London.

Natalie Hume is an independent art historian whose research interests include medium, material culture and the politics of visual representation. Her PhD, awarded by the Courtauld Institute of Art, investigated nineteenth-century transatlantic relations through the lens of commercial art.