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ArgumentThe 2014 session of the Princeton-Weimar Summer School for Media Studies is devoted to&#160;approaches in media analysis whose focus are the operations, procedures, and practices that&#160;constitute cultures. In distinction to approaches whose goal is a comprehensive media&#160;theory, the&#160;fourth Princeton-Weimar Summer School for Media Studies will map out what can be called the&#160;&#8220;practical turn&#8220; in media analysis.This &#8220;practical turn&#8221; is documented first and foremost by the rapid expansion of the new field of&#160;Cultural Techniques, the study of symbolic or symbol-generating practices and operations that are&#160;the very basis of cultures. These include techniques and media of reading, writing, and calculating,&#160;but also entail practices and methods of representation (e.g. linear perspective, but also masks,&#160;personae, effigies, votives), navigation, and technical or technological operations such as&#160;constructing, designing, collecting, modelling, drawing, note-taking, map-making, bookkeeping,&#160;filing, and the like. With the operational logic of cultural technologies as its goal, this strand of&#160;analysis focuses on the relation of technology, media, and culture and the operational production&#160;of networks between these.&#160;It can be argued that the study of cultural techniques intersects with a version of philology, one&#160;that returns to (but also reinvents) the operations and practices that make it possible to analyse&#160;texts as media, and which therefore can be called &#8220;media philology.&#8221; Philology and media studies&#160;have been entangled from the beginning, of course: a number of media scholars, including&#160;Marshall McLuhan, Eric A. Havelock, Walter J. Ong, or Friedrich Kittler were trained as&#160;philologists and literary critics. But more importantly (and perhaps unsurprisingly), media studies&#160;owe a considerable part of their methodological approaches to the field of literary studies. The&#160;most prominent examples here are the study of the transition from oral poetry to written and&#160;printed literature by the Toronto School of Communication and Kittler&#8217;s analysis of&#160;Aufschreibesysteme&#160;(discourse networks).Media philology is on the one hand dedicated to practices such as (re-)reading, collective reading,&#160;note-taking, compiling, collecting, or searching and finding, and on the other hand to operations&#160;and operators like spatialization, titles, paragraphs, page numbers, blanks, quotation marks, ellipses&#160;and so forth. Media philology thus de-centers the transcendental signified of hermeneutics and its&#160;cultural semantics, and situates at the core of the discipline operations, practices, and materialities&#160;which are, far from being mere auxiliary means, crucial conditions for the constitution of entities&#160;like the author, the reader, the work, and the process of meaning production.Beyond the study of cultural techniques and (media) philology, recent developments in sociology&#160;and anthropology demonstrate an increasing emphasis on practices, operations, and procedures.&#160;Examples here are Bruno Latour&#8217;s studies of laboratory practice and of chains of operations&#160;especially in the production of scientific facts; Tim Ingold&#8217;s theory of making and especially the&#160;&#8220;textility&#8221; of making; Niklas Luhmann&#8217;s sociological systems theory as well as Michel de Certeau&#8217;s&#160;inquiries into the&#160;Practices of Everyday Life.In all of these approaches, the knowledge produced is not a theoretical one but one that depends&#160;on the very operations and procedures of its own production. Media philology, for instance,&#160;emphasizes both the technical character of philological knowledge and its dependence on specific&#160;technologies of writing. The fourth Princeton-Weimar summer school will therefore place special&#160;emphasis on the relevance of philological practices and operations for a &#8220;computerized society.&#8221; If,&#160;as media scholar Lev Manovich claims, the database has become the symbolic form of our culture,&#160;what role do philological practices play? How does the database differ from traditional collections&#160;of documents, e.g. archives and libraries, and which operations of access does the database&#160;instantiate?The summer school will explore how these approaches can advance the methodological&#160;framework for an analysis of cultures that is based on media operations, procedures, practices.How to applyThe Princeton-Weimar Summer School for Media Studies invites applications from outstanding&#160;doctoral candidates throughout the world in media studies and related fields such as film studies,&#160;literary studies, philosophy, art history, architecture, sociology, politics, the history of science and visual culture.&#160;All applications should be submitted electronically in PDF format and should include the following:Letter of Intent indicating academic experience and interest in the summer school&#8217;s annual topic (max. 300 words);Curriculum Vitae (max. 2 pages);Abstract of a possible presentation at the Princeton-Weimar Summer School for Media Studies of no more than 2000 words, double spaced, with standard margins;Contact information (name, institutional address, email) of two potential references.Please use the following naming convention for your application files:Lastname_Letter_of_Intent.pdfLastname_Curriculum_Vitae.pdfLastname_Abstract.pdfLastname_Contact_Info.pdfAll application materials should be sent by email tossms@princeton.eduand must&#160;be received by&#160;November 25, 2013.Applicants who have been admitted will be notified by December 2013.Once admitted, applicants are required to transfer a participation fee which covers full accommodation, meals, and all study materials during the entire week of the summer school.The payment of $750 should be received by February 28, 2014 to guarantee the spot. A limited amount of travel funding will be available upon application.Academic Staff 2013Thomas Y. Levin, German Department, Princeton (Director)Bernhard Siegert , IKKM, Weimar (Director)Eduardo Cadava, English Department, Princeton (Faculty)Brigid Doherty, German Department, Princeton (Faculty)Lorenz Engell, IKKM, Weimar (Faculty)Ute Holl, Medienwissenschaft, Weimar (Faculty)Helga Lutz, Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Erfurt (Faculty)Claus Pias, Kultur und &#196;sthetik Digitaler Medien, L&#252;neburg (Faculty)Christoph Engemann, IKKM, Weimar (Coordinator)Jeffrey Kirkwood, German Department, Princeton (Coordinator)Olga Moskatova, IKKM, Weimar (Coordinator)