Britta Lange

en

Britta Lange is a lecturer at the Institute of the History and Theory of Culture at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She studied art history, cultural and media studies in Cologne and Berlin and received her PHD in cultural science from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2005, where she also completed her Postdoctoral lecture qualification (Habilitation) in 2012. She was post-doctotal research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2005-07) and a Lise Meitner research fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna (2008-2010). Her research focus is on cultural history and cultural techniques, colonialism and postcolonial approaches, early photo, film and sound documents. Selected publications: Echt. Unecht. Lebensecht. Menschenbilder im Umlauf, Berlin: Kadmos Kulturverlag, 2006 (dissertation), together with Margit Berner and Anette Hoffmann: Sensible Sammlungen. Aus dem anthropologischen Depot, Hamburg: philo fine arts, 2011; Die Wiener Forschungen an Kriegsgefangenen 1915-1918. Anthropologische und ethnografische Verfahren im Lager, Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2013; Die Entdeckung Deutschlands. Science-Fiction als Propaganda, Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2014.

research

research expositions

  • Archive, Collection, Museum: On the History of the Archiving of Voices at the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University (2017) author(s): Britta Lange published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    Available today under the name of the Berlin Sound Archive (Berliner Lautarchiv) or the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University (Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) is a collection of now largely digitalized sound storage media begun in 1915 (https://www.lautarchiv.hu-berlin.de/, all internet references retrieved 24th June 2016). The collection includes shellac records with recordings of prisoners of war (1915-1918), sound recordings of the voices of so-called famous personalities (1917-1939), speech samples of German dialects (1921-1943), and recitations of poetry and literature in German (1930s and 1940s) as well as magnetic tapes from the 1960s that have not yet been transferred to a digital format. While, since its inception, the collection has repeatedly been referred to as a sound archive, prior to the digitalization of the shellac holdings in the 1990s this term never found its way into any of its official names. Against this background, this article traces both the Sound Archive’s early institutional history (1915-1947) as well as the use of the term “sound archive.” By considering the archiving of voices in the framework of an emerging history of knowledge, it explores the disciplinary contexts (the academic sciences) and configurations of conservation, research, and presentation (collection, archive, laboratory, library, and museum) in which the preserved human voice operates as an epistemic object. On the basis of a renewed examination of a number of sound recordings of prisoners of war, it should be shown how this historical material can be made productive for current research horizons.
     open exposition comments (0)