The winner of the 2016 Domitor Student Essay Award is Allain Daigle (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) for “Not A Betting Man: Stanford, Muybridge, and the Palo Alto Wager-Myth.” This essay tackles one of the oldest myths in pre-cinema history, that of the supposed bet on a horse’s “un-supported transit” which Muybridge’s photo-sequence has been reported to have proven for the benefit of Leland Stanford. Although questioned from as early as 1915, Daigle shows how claim and counter-claim have reverberated through the large and continuing literatures on Muybridge, Stanford, and indeed photography’s place in the narratives of modern science and cinema. Going well beyond merely identifying degrees of veracity, the author impressively identifies what has been at stake in various claims, in terms of ideology, ownership and ultimately how we write the history of complex multi-agent developments in technology and science.

View the announcement here, http://domitor.org/awards/.