Boxes Bauer, Susanne, Schlünder, Martina, Rentetzi, Maria, Kismet Bell, Jameson, Brownell, Emily, Mechler, Ulrich Published by Mattering Press Bauer, Susanne, et al. Boxes: A Field Guide. 1 ed. Mattering Press, 2020. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.81373. For additional information about this book [ Access provided at 18 Mar 2021 21:10 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a https://muse.jhu.edu/book/81373 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. M AT T E R I N G P R E S S Mattering Press is an academic-led Open Access publisher that operates on a not-for-profit basis as a UK registered charity. It is committed to developing new publishing models that can widen the constituency of academic knowledge and provide authors with significant levels of support and feedback. All books are available to download for free or to purchase as hard copies. More at matteringpress.org. The Press’ work has been supported by: Centre for Invention and Social Process (Goldsmiths, University of London), European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, Hybrid Publishing Lab, infostreams, Institute for Social Futures (Lancaster University), OpenAIRE, Open Humanities Press, and Tetragon, as well as many other institutions and individuals that have supported individual book projects, both financially and in kind. Making this b o o k Mattering Press is keen to render more visible the unseen processes that go into the production of books. We would like to thank Endre Dányi, who acted as the Press’ coordinating editor for this book, Joe Deville for editing and his work on the book production, Julien McHardy for editing and design, the two review- ers Geof Bowker and Claire Waterton, Steven Lovatt for the copy editing, Alex Billington and Tetragon for the typesetting, and Will Roscoe, Ed Akerboom, and infostreams for their contributions to the html versions of this book. B OX E S A Field Guide edited by susanne bauer, martina schlünder and maria rentetzi First edition published by Mattering Press, Manchester. Copyright © Susanne Bauer, Martina Schlünder, and Maria Rentetzi, chapters by respective authors, 2020. Cover art © Julien McHardy, 2020. Freely available online at matteringpress.org/books/boxes This is an open access book, with the text and cover art licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the material is not used for commercial purposes and the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ ISBN: 978–1-912729–01–2 (pbk) ISBN: 978–1-912729–02–9 (pdf) ISBN: 978–1-912729–03–6 (epub) ISBN: 978–1-912729–04–3 (html) Mattering Press has made every effort to contact copyright holders and will be glad to rectify, in future editions, any errors or omissions brought to our notice. 5 CONTENTS List of Figures 9 Contributors 16 Boxing Practices 25 Preface and Acknowledgements 26 I N T R O D U C T I O N S 1 The Generative Possibilities of the Wrong Box Martina Schlünder 29 2 The Epistemology of the Familiar: A Hymn to Pandora Maria Rentetzi 37 3 Navigation Tools for Studying Boxes: A User’s Manual Susanne Bauer 45 I · T R A P 4 Inscribing the Soul: Cerebral Ventricles as Symbolic and Material Boxes Jameson Kısmet Bell 55 5 Better Shelter Emily Brownell 73 6 Slide Box: How to Stock Some Thousand Cancer Cases Ulrich Mechler 93 7 System Box (Tray) with Wasp Tahani Nadim 109 I I · J U K E 8 Thinking Inside the Box: The Construction of Knowledge in a Miniature Seventeenth-Century Cabinet Stephanie Bowry 127 6 Contents 9 Musical Instrument Boxes. Hidden Information: Cases for Musical Instruments and Their Functions Beatrix Darmstädter 145 10 Boxing Crickets: A Taxonomy of Containers for Singing and Fighting Ensifera Martina Siebert 157 I I I · T I M E 11 Contesting the Box: Museums and Repatriation Stewart Allen 169 12 Archaeology and Cigarettes: ‘Ekphora’ and ‘Periphora’ of the Archaeological Identity through Cigarette Packs Styliana Galiniki and Eleftheria Akrivopoulou 187 13 More than a Toy Box: Dandanah and the Sea of Stories Artemis Yagou 203 I V · C A R G O 14 The Ur -Box: Multispecies Take-off from Noah’s Ark to Animal Air Cargo Nils Güttler, Martina Schlünder, Susanne Bauer 215 15 Parcels Render Neglected People Visible Tanja Hammel 231 16 Boxes, Infrastructure and the Materiality of Moral Relations: Aid and Respect after Cyclone Pam Alexandra Widmer 241 V · B L A C K 17 ‘As Modern As Tomorrow’: The Medicine Cabinet Deanna Day 255 18 The Green Minna: Transporting Police Detainees in Imperial Berlin Eric J. Engstrom 271 19 Scaling Up from the Bench: Fermentation Tank Victoria Lee 289 7 Contents 20 Deep Time History: The Lure of the Black Box Dagmar Schäfer 307 V I · T E X T 21 Panels and Frames: Toward a New Relationship between Text and Image in Academic Writing Pit Arens and Martina Schlünder 327 22 Analogue Privacy: The Paper Shredder as a Technology for Knowledge Destruction Sarah Blacker 365 V I I · I C E 23 Biobank Boxes: Technologies of Population Susanne Bauer 381 24 The Magic of Dropbox, its Virtuality and Materiality Shih-Pei Chen 397 V I I I · A N X I E T Y 25 Domestic Reservoirs: Managing Drinking Water in Taiwanese Households Yi-Ping Cheng 409 26 Keep Calm and Carry One: The Civilian Gas Mask Case and its Containment of British Emotions Mats Fridlund 425 27 Cardboard Box: The Politics of Materiality Maria Rentetzi 443 I X · C O U N T 28 Petri dish (boîte de Petri, Petrischale) Mathias Grote 459 29 Prussian Census Box: Moving and Freezing Data Christine von Oertzen 473 30 Black-Boxing Knowledge: Glass Dosimeters and Governmental Control Maria Rentetzi 481 8 Contents X · M I R R O R 31 The Mirror Trap Etienne S. Benson 493 32 Shifting Medical Bottles: In Between Medical and Indigenous Worlds Johanna Gonçalves Martín 505 33 Guarding the Memory: Photographic Glass Plates Negatives’ Boxes Mirka Palioura, Spyridoula Pyrpili, Myrto Vouleli 525 34 Lousy Research: The History of Typhus Vaccine Production, 1915–1945 Martina Schlünder 539 X I · T O O L 35 The Mechanic’s Toolbox and Tool Chest: A Nexus of the Personal and the Social Don Duprez 559 36 Surgeons’ Chests from the Mary Rose Hanako Endo 571 37 Ruminations on an Electrotherapeutic Box Jan Eric Olsén 583 38 Reliquary: A Box for a Relic Lucy Razzall 597 39 The Research Box Bonnie Mak and Julia Pollack 607 9 LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1.1 Linné’s classification of the animal kingdom, 1735 (excerpt) 28 Fig. 2.1 Clay pyxis, 410–400 BC no. 13676 a , National Archaeological Museum, Athens, Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/Archaeological Receipts Fund 36 Fig. 3.1 Retired overseas containers, reused to house workshops and storage in Kyrgyzstan 44 Fig. 4.1 Berengario da Carpi, Tractatus de fractura calve sive cranei a Carpo editus (1518) 54 Fig. 4.2 Berengario da Carpi, Isagoge breves (1523) 59 Fig. 4.3 Joannes de Ketham Fasciculus medicine (1495) 65 Fig. 5.1 ‘Better Shelter’ refugee housing unit 72 Fig. 5.2 Interior image of a Better Shelter prototype 75 Fig. 5.3 Paul Lester Wiener’s design for portable and modular temporary housing 79 Fig. 5.4 Earthquake tents from after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 80 Fig. 5.5 Earthquake cottages provided for some victims of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco 81 Fig. 5.6 Earthquake cottage being moved by horses 81 Fig. 5.7 Dadaab Refugee Camp, Kenya 85 Fig. 6.1 Microscopic slide box from the collection of German pathologist Karl Lennert 92 Fig. 6.2 Same slide box as above, detail 97 Fig. 6.3 Filing cards, Lennert Collection 103 Fig. 7.1 Box 108 Fig. 7.2 Boxes waiting in factory 111 Fig. 7.3 Boxes waiting in museum 112 10 List of figures Fig. 7.4 Our wasp in a box 114 Fig. 7.5 Bugs in boxes 117 Fig. 7.6 Wasps in a box 117 Fig. 8.1 The Augsburg Art Cabinet, Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala, Sweden 126 Fig. 8.2 Gilded and ebony-veneered cabinet demonstrated by the master carpenter (left) to his client (right), UUK31 132 Fig. 8.3 The front side of the cabinet 135 Fig. 8.4 Miniature book, UUK 212 137 Fig. 9.1 Tartölten in their case, SAM 208 – SAM 212 144 Fig. 9.2 The case for the violin made of tortoise shell, SAM 638 149 Fig. 9.3 The spinettino in its box, SAM 121 149 Fig. 9.4 The case for four recorders signed with ‘!!’ SAM 171 152 Fig. 10.1 Disposable straw cage (without cricket) 156 Fig. 10.2 Force-grown gourd container with wooden lid 160 Fig. 10.3 Round box cricket container made from grey clay, with lid 161 Fig. 11.1 The Marischal College and Marischal Museum, Aberdeen 168 Fig. 11.2 Poster for ‘Going Home’ exhibition in Marischal Museum 2003–2004 177 Fig. 11.3 Photograph of repatriation ceremony in Marischal Museum, 2003 179 Fig. 12.1 Cigarette packs used for storage in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki 186 Fig. 13.1 Dandanah , The Fairy Palace 202 Fig. 14.1 Ur -Box 214 Fig. 14.2 Kircher’s ark, floor plan 217 Fig. 14.3 Model of a cargo plane in the entrance to Frankfurt Airport’s Animal Lounge 220 Figs. 14.4a , 14.4b Salvation of swallows in ‘Aktion Südflug’ 221 Fig. 14.5 Animal Lounge, Frankfurt Airport 223 Fig. 14.6 Transportation of a killer whale 226 Fig. 14.7 Container requirement 55, for dolphin and whale species 226 Fig. 15.1 A wooden box from the Natural History Museum – Archives of Life, Basel, Switzerland 230 11 List of figures Fig. 15.2 A cardboard box filled with wooden boxes at the Natural History Museum – Archives of Life, Basel, Switzerland 236 Fig. 15.3 Menus for ‘After Hours Summer Edition, Chillen im Museum’, 11 September 2014 237 Fig. 16.1 ‘Aid is seen on-board an Australian RAAF C-17 Globe- master in transit on March 16, 2015 to Port Vila, Vanuatu’ 240 Fig. 16.2 ‘Plane arrives in Port Vila with aid packages’ 243 Fig. 17.1 First prize medicine cabinet designed by S. C. Carpenter in Cleveland, Ohio 254 Fig. 17.2 Third prize medicine cabinet designed by John W. Knobel in Ozone Park, New York. Fourth prize medicine cabinet designed by Marvin J. Neivert in Lawrence, New York 261 Fig. 18.1 The Green Minna in front of a police station 270 Fig. 18.2 Unloading the Green Minna in the courtyard of the Central Police Station 274 Fig. 18.3 In need of a box 281 Fig. 19.1 50kl stirred aerated fermenter 288 Fig. 19.2a Rotary drum fermenter 295 Fig. 19.2b Laboratory-scale fermentation apparatus 295 Fig. 19.2c Large-scale fermentation apparatus 296 Fig. 19.3a Aerating system of the perforated tube type for a huge propagating tub 296 Fig. 19.3b Early forms of perforated tube systems: a) inverted T, b) perforated ring, c) spiral sparger 297 Fig. 19.3c Network of perforated tubes 297 Fig. 19.3d Different kinds of spargers: a) single nozzle sparger, b) ring sparger, and c) micro sparger 297 Fig. 19.4 Agitator wing designs 298 Fig. 19.5 Scaling up: (1) shake flasks (small-scale), (2) jar fermenter (small to medium-scale), (3) pilot plant (medium-scale), (4) tank (large-scale) 299 Fig. 20.1 元末明初的黑漆书箱 Black shellac lacquer book-box from the late Yuan/early Ming Dynasty 306 12 List of figures Fig. 20.2 ‘Circuits in a Box’ 312 Fig. 20.3 ‘Transfer between Boxes’ 312 Fig. 20.4 ‘Boxed-up Ghosts’ 318 Fig. 20.5 ‘Scenes in “the Black”’ 320 Fig. 22.1 Haberling Sicherheitsbehälter at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 364 Fig. 22.2 Paper shredder at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 364 Fig. 22.3 Hama paper shredder (designed for home use) 366 Fig. 22.4 The paper shredder’s metal ‘teeth’, spinning shaft, and paper fragments produced 367 Fig. 22.5 Abbot Augustus Low’s illustrations of his ‘waste-paper receptacle’ invention for his 1909 patent application 370 Fig. 22.6 Adolf Ehinger’s ‘diagrammatic top-plan view of a shredder’ 371 Fig. 22.7 Ron Hildebrand sweeping shredded paper fragments into a ‘compactor’ to produce ‘paper bales’ 375 Fig. 22.8 Shredded paper fragments in the process of being reconstructed by the ‘Stasi-Schnipselmaschine’ 376 Fig. 22.9 Larger, hand-torn paper fragments in the process of being reconstructed by the ‘Stasi-Schnipselmaschine’ 377 Fig. 23.1 Freezer tanks at -160°C. Biobank sample storage for a study on nutrition and health in Denmark 380 Fig. 23.2 Biobank tanks in their habitat 387 Fig. 23.3 Epidemiological box-apparatus: the 2 x 2 contingency table 389 Fig. 23.4 A hydraulic model of population 390 Figs. 23.5a , 23.5b Left: Hospital box, Herlev Hospital, opened 1976; Right: Biobank elevators inside Herlev Hospital 392 Fig. 24.1 The Dropbox icon 396 Fig. 24.2 What a data centre looks like 404 Figs. 25.1 , 25.1b Mirror perspective. Pictures and details of water dispensers 408 Fig. 25.2 Flow chart: material paths of drinking water in Taiwanese households 412 13 List of figures Fig. 25.3 Flow chart: material path and appliances of ‘warm’ drinking water in Taiwanese households 417 Fig. 25.4a Jio’s water dispenser 418 Fig. 25.4b Wu’s water dispenser 418 Fig. 26.1 General civilian anti-gas respirator carrying case with British civilian gas mask 424 Fig. 26.2 Civilians walking on the streets of London with gas mask cases after the outbreak of the Second World War 427 Fig. 26.3 The British civilian gas mask and officially issued cardboard gas mask case, with cord for carrying 429 Fig. 26.4 Carry one everywhere 430 Figs. 26.5a , 26.5b Gendering the fear of gas 433 Fig. 26.6 Gas mask box counts in London by Mass Observation 434 Fig. 27.1 A homeless man sleeps inside a cardboard box on Ermou street in central Athens in the early hours of Sunday, 28 June 2015 442 Fig. 27.2 Albert Jones’s patent for the improvement in paper for packing, 1871 448 Fig. 27.3 American singer Wyoma Winters was named Miss Folding Paper Box 1952 at the annual Folding Paper Box Association of America 452 Fig. 27.4 An elderly homeless African-American woman pushes a pram with a large cardboard box on top 453 Fig. 28.1 Petri dish 458 Fig. 29.1 Prussian census box as used for the 1871 census, reconstructed to size by Norbert Massuthe, Berlin (2016) 472 Fig. 29.2 Prussian Counting Card, 210x210 mm (1871) 475 Fig. 30.1 An open glass DT-60 personnel dosimeter 480 Fig. 30.2 A set of ten original DT-60 dosimeters packaged with instructions and specifications 484 Fig. 30.3 Children in Fukushima with their radiation dosimeters called ‘glass badges’ 485 Fig. 31.1 ‘Mirror trap set, showing trigger mechanism, mirror, and rubber bands, fastened to bottom of door’ 492 14 List of figures Fig. 31.2 A modified design of the mirror trap 497 Fig. 32.1 Drawing of a variety of medicine bottles, made by a Yanomami health agent 504 Fig. 32.2 Pharmacy of a health post containing an assortment of medicines and other medical equipment 508 Fig. 32.3 Doctor’s case for carrying injectable medicines during a visit to the villages 509 Fig. 32.4 A Yanomami health agent looks for medicines carried to a village in a special backpack, and also within a Yanomami basket 509 Fig. 32.5 Drawing of a mother holding a child, with a diversity of containers for diarrhoea medicine 515 Fig. 32.6 Area of the roof above the hearth 515 Fig. 33.1 Box by Agfa, Germany 524 Fig. 33.2 Box by Lastre M. Cappelli, Italy 531 Fig. 33.3 Box by J. Jougla, France 532 Fig. 33.4 Box by Grieshaber Frères & Cie, France 532 Fig. 33.5 Box by Richard Jahr, Germany 533 Fig. 33.6 Box by Gevaert, Belgium 535 Fig. 33.7 Box by Gevaert, Belgium 535 Figs. 34.1a , 34.1b The box and the imprinting of its content: During and after feeding the lice 538 Fig. 34.2 A set of Sikora boxes and its kin species 541 Figs. 34.3a , 34.3b Empty boxes (healthy lice) and full boxes (filled with Rickettsia prowazeki) 544 Figs. 34.4a , 34.4b A sanitary train during the Serbian typhus epidemic of 1915, and men leaving the train after having been de-loused in the steam bath 547 Figs. 34.5a , 34.5b Dissecting units at the Behring Institute, Lwów around 1942 549 Fig. 34.6 Louse feeders at the Behring Institute, Lwów ca. 1942 551 Fig. 34.7 Jews-Lice-Typhus, Nazi propaganda poster, 1941 552 Fig. 35.1 Highboy Tool Chest 558 Fig. 35.2 A wheeled, steel chest with a wooden top 558 15 List of figures Fig. 36.1 The surgeon’s chest from the surgeon’s cabin in the Mary Rose, the Mary Rose Museum, Portsmouth 570 Fig. 36.2 Another surgeon’s chest from the Mary Rose 573 Fig. 37.1 Open electrotherapy box 582 Fig. 37.2 Closed electrotherapy box 584 Fig. 37.3 George Adams’s prototype; 1785 essay on electricity or a later edition 588 Fig. 38.1 Reliquary with scenes from the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket, c.1173–1180 596 Fig. 39.1 Research Box, on display 606 Fig. 39.2 Research Box, in closed form 606 Fig. 39.3 Research Box prefers human companionship 608 Fig. 39.4 Research Box, detail of performance 609 Fig. 39.5 Research Box, field marks 610 Fig. 39.6 Research Box, in Kavala 611 Fig. 39.7 Research Box, on display in the Kavala Municipal Tobacco Warehouse 612 Fig. 39.8 Research Box, at the Copenhagen Business School 614 Fig. 39.9 Human interlocutors at the Copenhagen Business School, building enquiry machines; meanwhile, Research Box reconfigures itself as an enquiry machine 614 Fig. 39.10 Enquiry machines in Copenhagen 615 Fig. 39.11 Research Box, transformed into enquiry machine 615 Fig. 39.12 Research Box, performing the digitisation of a text 617 Fig. 39.13 Research Box, drawing attention to the varying sizes of digitised texts and images 618 Fig. 39.14 Research Box, performing as a publication in the humanities 621 16 C ONTRIBUTORS eLeftheria akrivopouLou studied Archaeology & Museology at University of Athens. She is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of History, Archaeology & Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly. She works as an museologist at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. She has dealt with excavation work and museological research at many museums as well as at the Greek Ministry of Culture. Her research has been published in conference proceedings and periodicals. stewart aLLen completed his PhD in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh in 2014. He pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Plank Institute for the History of Science between 2014 and 2016 and has previously written on knowledge production, skill, and how narratives of social good are produced and circulated. He is the author of the book An Ethnography of NGO Practice in India: Utopias of Development published by Manchester University Press. pit arens graduated from the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His inter- disciplinary work moves between science and art, craft and sculpture, theory and practice, text and image. He works in different media: sculpture, installation, film, drawing and ceramics. susanne Bauer is professor in Science and Technologies Studies (STS) at the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo. Trained as environmental scientist and epidemiologist, her work in the social studies of science has unpacked calculative infrastructures and data politics in the health sciences. Her current research interests range from the conditions of intensified 17 ContriButors data recombination and the making and circulation of regulatory knowledges, to airports as multiple borderlands, and logistics as technoscience. etienne Benson is an associate professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies animal history, the history of ecology, and the history of environmentalism, with a focus on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. He is the author of Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife (2010). sarah BLaCker is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Munich Center for Technology in Society at the Technical University of Munich. Her research examines the production and circulation of scientific knowledge about the rela- tion between environmental contamination, racialization, and health inequalities in the era of financialization. stephanie Bowry is a historian specialising in the cultural performance of museums during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She completed her PhD on the visual representation of the world in early modern curiosity cabi- nets and its reflection in contemporary art practice in 2015. Her most recent research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and hosted by the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, examined the relationships between gardens and art galleries from 1500 – 1750. emiLy BrowneLL is a lecturer in Environmental History at the University of Edinburgh. Her book, Gone to Ground: An Environmental History of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania , was published in 2020 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her work focuses on environmental, infrastructural, and planning histories in East Africa. shih-pei Chen is a digital humanities researcher at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, where she researches and develops digital method- ologies for studying the history of science, technology, and medicine. She specializes in conducting text analyses, text/data mining, data visualization, and geospatial analyses to answer historical research questions. Her current