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Eighteenth-century Britons witnessed unprecedented growth in garment production. As modes of production moved away from a small-scale domestic model toward increasing mechanization and steadily growing fabrication of clothing for the middle classes, the period’s new methods of production relied heavily on the labour of women. Despite the considerable participation of women in the proto-industrial workroom, narratives of women employed in the garment trades remain largely understudied. One of the primary reasons garment trades women have received relatively little critical attention is that they are epistemologically slippery. Unlike the more affluent women of the period whose lives were often meticulously documented, garment workers are largely absent from the historical record. Beginning with popular and well-documented characters and persons in the eighteenth-century socio-cultural lexicon, this project traces networks of female labour that run between the playhouse and the workshop to illuminate the lives of women who have previously been relegated to the margins of discourse. Whereas intellectual history often focuses on garments and fashion as particularly important to female networks of communication, I argue that there is much to be gained by examining the women who made these items and the ways in which they are represented in literary accounts and historical records.

In this dissertation, I look at the history of cloud computing to demonstrate the entanglement of history, metaphor, and materiality. In telling this story, I argue that metaphors play a powerful role in how we imagine, construct, and maintain our technological futures. The cloud, as a metaphor in computing, works to simplify complexities in distributed networking infrastructures. The language and imagery of the cloud has been used as a tool that helps cloud providers shift public focus away from potentially important regulatory, environmental, and social questions while constructing a new computing marketplace. To address these topics, I contextualize the history of the cloud by looking back at the stories of utility computing (1960s-70s) and ubiquitous computing (1980s-1990s). These visions provide an alternative narrative about the design and regulation of new technological systems. Drawing upon these older metaphors of computing, I describe the early history of the cloud (1990-2008) in order to explore how this new vision of computing was imagined. I suggest that the metaphor of the cloud was not a historical inevitability. Rather, I argue that the social-construction of metaphors in computing can play a significant role in how the public thinks about, develops, and uses new technologies. In this research, I explore how the metaphor of the cloud underplays the impact of emerging large-scale computing infrastructures while at the same time slowly transforming traditional ownership-models in digital communications. Throughout the dissertation, I focus on the role of materiality in shaping digital technologies. I look at how the development of the cloud is tied to the establishment of cloud data centers and the deployment of global submarine data cables. Furthermore, I look at the materiality of the cloud by examining its impact on a local community (Los Angeles, CA). Throughout this research, I argue that the metaphor of the cloud often hides deeper socio-technical complexities. Both the materials and metaphor of the cloud work to make the system invisible. By looking at the material impact of the cloud, I demonstrate how these larger economic, social, and political realities are entangled in the story and metaphor of the cloud. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation tells the story of cloud computing by looking at the history of the cloud and then discussing the social and political implications of this history. I start by arguing that the cloud is connected to earlier visions of computing (specifically, utility computing and ubiquitous computing). By referencing these older histories, I argue that much of what we currently understand as cloud computing is actually connected to earlier debates and efforts to shape a computing future. Using the history of computing, I demonstrate the role that metaphor plays in the development of a technology. Using these earlier histories, I explain how cloud computing was coined in the 1990s and eventually became a dominant vision of computing in the late 2000s. Much of the research addresses how the metaphor of the cloud is used, the initial reaction to the idea of the cloud, and how the creation of the cloud did (or did not) borrow from older visions of computing. This research looks at which people use the cloud, how the cloud is marketed to different groups, and the challenges of conceptualizing this new distributed computing network. This dissertation gives particular weight to the materiality of the cloud. My research focuses on the cloud's impact on data centers and submarine communication data cables. Additionally, I look at the impact of the cloud on a local community (Los Angeles, CA). Throughout this research, I argue that the metaphor of the cloud often hides deeper complexities. By looking at the material impact of the cloud, I demonstrate how larger economic, social, and political realities are entangled in the story and metaphor of the cloud.

Themes on a Fallow House is a study of architecture and its effect on the way we create collective memories, accumulate material culture, and associate ourselves with place. Through experimenting with analog processes and materials, this work aims to suggest that architecture acts as a repository for memories. Yet, amidst an ever changing society and landscape, the inevitable degradation of architecture, and therefore the memories accumulated within its material, will eventually occur. This degradation is the tool which allows for new meanings to be transferred onto objects and places, thus they live on. / Master of Architecture / Themes on a Fallow House is a study into how architecture relates to memory both for the individual and the collective. Using my Grandfather's farm as a place of inquiry, I experiment with analog processes and materials to further examine the ways in which architecture influences us and why certain places might matter to us. Furthermore, Themes on a Fallow House begins a discussion on why certain places might live on as artifacts of a past time, while others crumble and fade into the past.

This thesis examines the portrayal of gentleman collectors in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literature, arguing that they often find themselves challenged and destabilised by their collections. The collecting depicted contrasts revealingly with the Enlightenment practices of classification, taxonomy, and commodification, associated with the growth of both the public museum and the market economy. The dominance of such practices was bound up with the way they promoted subject-object relations that defined and empowered masculine identity. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer note that “[i]n the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty” (3). That being so, this study explores how the drive to classify and commodify the material world found oppositional, fictional form in gothicly inflected texts depicting a fascinating but frightening world of unknowable, alien objects and abject, emasculated subjects. The study draws upon Fred Botting’s contention that gothic extremes are a reaction to the “framework” of “reductive and normalising limits of bourgeois morality and modes of production” (89). Examining novels and short stories by Richard Marsh, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee, George Gissing, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Mary Cholmondeley, and Mary Ward, the thesis shows how gothicised instances of unproductive-masochism, pathological collecting, thwarted professionals, and emasculated heirs broke down the “framework” within which men and material culture were understood to interact productively and safely. Individual chapters dealing respectively with acquisition, possession, dissemination and inheritance, respond to the recent “material turn” in the humanities, bringing together literary criticism and historically grounded scholarship to reveal the collector and the collection as the locus 3 for concerns with masculinity and materiality that preoccupied a turn-of-the-century mindset.

The things we have an intimate connection to, handle, collect, and move around with us, are treasures that we need to hold on to. They are important in coping with the balance of movement and stability in a fast-changing world. This project is an investigation of the relationship between people and objects through the making and handling of stones. I explore why and how we connect intimately with physical objects, how they become treasures to us and what it means. Through digging into the stones, connecting to their story of endurance, change and solidity, and eventually letting them go, I explore the role of touching and paying attention, in making and relating to objects and transformation. The stone objects are made from pieces of rock I have collected while travelling. All of them have been transformed by human hands before I picked them out, and many have been given out and then returned to me. Through this ongoing process of transformation and physical encounters, it is becoming clear to me that connection is not only about solidity and stillness, but also about being part of the transformation. Stone as a material is both solid and changing. I aim to make objects of stone that attract and encourage people to engage with them – to experience the pleasure and groundedness that slowing down, zooming in and getting in touch can offer.

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This study examines the role of things in the making of New Netherland in the seventeenth century and the formation of New York in the early eighteenth century. With an attention to the translations of form and transculturations of meaning for objects, which have often led peripatetic lives, I focus on previously marginalized crafts and everyday objects like books, tea tables, chairs, hearth tiles, and other domestic goods found in peoples’ homes, to describe the way things connected people and places in early modern Dutch trade networks. Through a careful analysis of objects of material culture and depictions of material culture I focus on how the colony was physically constructed and ideologically imagined internally by the colonists and externally by other interested parties throughout Atlantic world. My research on the making, circulation, and consumption of things in and from New Netherland develops intersecting narratives of the past, some of them regional and localized, others cross-cultural, transnational, and global. By connecting artifacts, objects, and things to larger narratives it is possible to write a new history of materiality and the making of New Netherland, primarily in the seventeenth century but also in later histories. In what follows, through the examination of increasingly mobile and hybrid material cultures in the Dutch Republic and New Netherland, I demonstrate that just like materialism and morality, worldliness and homeliness were not binary constructs, but mutually constructive and inextricably intertwined in the oud and nieuw Netherlands. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2013-10-12 18:03:55.576

In recent years, revisionism in Canadian museums has created a space for the development of different ways of classifying and representing non-Western visual and material culture. Despite these changes, many mainstream or authoritative museums and other cultural institutions still operate largely as separate from the constituent communities to which the non-Western collections in their possession are directly related. This thesis investigates the complex relationship between three different types of collections of African visual and material culture in Canada, the institutions in which they reside, and the relationship to the constituent communities that have a stake in the reception of these collections. These collections include the ethnographic collection of African artifacts at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Lang Collection of African Art at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, and the African cultural collection at the North American Black Historical Museum and Cultural Centre in Amherstburg. As this thesis makes clear, the very nature of incorporating, classifying and displaying African visual and material culture in Western museums, which are a direct product of the colonial era, is fraught with contentions. In light of this, the growth in cultural centres in Canada in recent years has the potential to inform mainstream museums, offering new ways of approaching and engaging with not only non-Western objects, but also their diverse constituent communities. By focusing on the discourse of museum representation in relation to African collections in Canada, this thesis posits that these collections can be understood as crucial sites for the promotion of cross-cultural negotiations between African and non-African Canadian communities. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2012-12-21 14:49:24.852

In this thesis, I will examine how objects are given narrative voices by memorial museum curators, and how these narrative qualities facilitate ethical and critical relations between museumgoers and traumatic histories. My two main points of contention arise out of these questions: 1. What does it mean for an object to be a witness in the context of trauma? 2. What might the material dimensions of witnessing accomplish in regards to museumgoers understanding of and ability to respond to their memorial museum experience? Instead of being silent witnesses to the past, I propose that objects can become contact points of ethical engagement and understanding when it concerns traumatic events in history. The ability and necessity of seeing objects as more than mere things to be manipulated by language and curatorial framing is crucial in cases of trauma, as they can become portals that can help overcome the “constitutive failure of linguistic representation in the post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima, post-Vietnam era” (Leys, p. 267f). This thesis will contribute to the theoretical and museological conversation concerning objects and their representation in the aftermath of trauma, with an emphasis on interobjectivity as a tool to combat consumptive empathy. Stressing the dialogic and relational functions of material witnesses will underscore the ultimate responsibility of the museumgoer to take on the role of secondary witness, a position that is perhaps fraught with unclear obligations, but is nevertheless crucial in the transmission of difficult histories. / Thesis (Master, Cultural Studies) -- Queen's University, 2013-08-17 11:27:55.134