Networks, infrastructures, systems, ecologies, and similar concepts have become central to media-historical studies. What these terms share is a function as media connectors. They link media across temporal, spatial, and disciplinary boundaries. Whether at a global or local scale or over longer or shorter time spans, research that engages with these concepts sheds light on how media operate within interconnected structures. Here, media should be understood in the widest possible sense, encompassing objects (such as photographic prints, books, or manuscripts), display devices (loudspeakers, projectors, digital screens), and storage media (film reels, vinyl records, cloud servers). It may also refer to elements within larger media systems, such as electronic signals, fibre-optic cables, and radio waves, or to media practices, including, for instance, the logistics of news agencies, the writing, sending and circulation of letters, or the collecting of digital and analogue photographs. Finally, it includes all the users, developers, artists, audiences, and distributors across different historical periods and cultural contexts.

By focusing on the broad and fundamental issue of media connectors, this symposium both wishes to reflect the diversity of media-historical research and to promote a methodological discussion that enables us to understand past and present media in new ways. We welcome contributions from scholars across disciplines who wish to engage with conceptual and empirical explorations of media connectors—their historical operations and effects as well as their epistemological implications. Possible points of inspiration include, but are not limited to:

• Connections across borders, whether across different academic disciplines, national media landscapes, epistemic cultures, or political and cultural fields.
• Relations between macro- and micro-levels, exploring how individual media elements function within larger infrastructural and systemic formations.
• Temporal connections, considering old and new media interrelations, anachronisms, media parallelism, historical change, media persistence, and obsolescence.
• The materiality of media infrastructures, including physical, technological, and logistical structures that enable media networks.
• Alternative or counter-networks, exploring subversive, underground, or non-hegemonic media formations that challenge dominant infrastructures.
• Relations between human and non-human agents in sustaining media infrastructures.
• Aesthetics of media connectivity, considering how artistic forms reflect, critique, or experiment with media interconnections.
• Meta-reflections on conceptual frameworks, analysing how networks, infrastructures, systems, and related concepts function as methodological tools and metaphors in media-historical research.

In addition, we welcome all other contributions of relevance to media-historical research.