CD - Doctoral Thesis, University of Salamanca, Spain
The present doctoral thesis approaches the taxonomic organization of Magic Lantern slides commercialized with a rigid base, translucent, and of any size, independently of their contents and date and place of origin.
The main hypothesis of the research poses whether content analysis, as a technique for coding knowledge about media messages, can be a suitable method for taxonomically organizing Magic Lantern slides.
A secondary hypothesis can then be deduced, related to the choice of the most operational criterion for classifying Magic Lantern slides: the size of their base (an ordinal variable with a manifest nature) or the format (a nominal variable with a latent nature)
The results also lead us to think that the spectator of the last five years of the 19th. Century saw without interruption all the audiovisual projections offered to him or her, both during magic lantern evenings and in the first showings of animated photography.
These possibility has had an influence on the need to open a debate about the historical-cultural importance of the Magic Lantern and other media artifacts that emerged between the 15th. and the 19th. Centuries, located half-way between drawing aids, scientific recreation, popular entertainment and the emerging mass media.
This CD contains a 765 pages PDF file including animated examples of mechanical magic lantern slides. Besides a myriad of magic lantern slide illustrations, the CD also depicts many optical toys such as magic lanterns, phenakistiscopes, zootropes, polyorama panotiques, peepshow views, etc.