Animating History: Digitally Mapping the United States Telegraph System.

Digital humanities is a booming field. This article introduces a new digital map that shows the development of the telegraph system in the United States from its inception in 1844 to 1862. This interactive map locates offices and lines, and it displays data that put the telegraph system in its political, social, and environmental contexts. As far as the authors know, this is the first born-digital map of a telegraph system anywhere in the world. Readers are invited to explore the freely available map, and historians of technology are encouraged to use digital maps for their research and teaching. Digital maps are ideal for visualizing systems and networks, two concepts that have dominated the history of technology for several decades. The ability to display time-sensitive data for several variables at the same time is especially useful.

Capitalism Matters: How Financial and Technological Innovations Shaped U.S. Telegraphs, 1845-60.

This article encourages historians of technology to elevate the history of capitalism from a subsidiary theme to a research agenda. It studies the United States's early telegraphs to exemplify the inseparability of technology and capitalism. Entrepreneurs were able to innovate technologically (build telegraph systems) thanks to innovating financially. After trying and failing to sell large amounts of stock to a few investors in big cities for funding construction, entrepreneurs succeeded by selling small amounts of stock to many investors spread across the country. Financial innovators turned technology users into investors. Conversely, entrepreneurs were able to innovate financially because of their technological innovation. They built telegraphs to sell stock. Corporate charters made a company's capital a multiple of its line mileage, so the only way to increase capital was to build lines.

Neurofunctional correlates of environmental cognition: an FMRI study with images from episodic memory.

This study capitalizes on individual episodic memories to investigate the question, how dif-ferent environments affect us on a neural level. Instead of using predefined environmental stimuli, this study relied on individual representations of beauty and pleasure. Drawing upon episodic memories we conducted two experiments. Healthy subjects imagined pleasant and non-pleasant environments, as well as beautiful and non-beautiful environments while neural activity was measured by using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Although subjects found the different conditions equally simple to visualize, our results revealed more distribut-ed brain activations for non-pleasant and non-beautiful environments than for pleasant and beautiful environments. The additional regions activated in non-pleasant (left lateral prefrontal cortex) and non-beautiful environments (supplementary motor area, anterior cortical midline structures) are involved in self-regulation and top-down cognitive control. Taken together, the results show that perceptual experiences and emotional evaluations of environments within a positive and a negative frame of reference are based on distinct patterns of neural activity. We interpret the data in terms of a different cognitive and processing load placed by exposure to different environments. The results hint at the efficiency of subject-generated representations as stimulus material.