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The media became the most important research subject at the First German Sociological Conference in 1910 when Max Weber presented a detailed description of a 'Survey of the Press'. This rather sophisticated study, which fitted his research program of a 'disenchantment of the world', was supposed to prove the sociologists' expertise in the area of empirical research. But it was never realized and after its failure the topic even disappeared from the discipline's agenda for many years. In Germany, this only changed more than a decade after the Second World War when communication studies were looking for a new identity as a social science. But there was no systematic research on the question whether and how Weber's suggestions had become relevant. This article seeks to demonstrate that Weber's concerns remain relevant in the area of journalism research. Based on bibliometrics and a keyword-oriented content analysis, it investigates whether Weber's traces can be found in studies aimed to answer the research questions he initially posed and also whether the categories and key terms contained in his oeuvre have been used. The results suggest that Weber's ideas were a valuable contribution to the 'measurement of the media world' that took place only decades later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Space historians have predominantly identified Weimar Germany (1919-1933) as the starting period of German debates over the possibility of spaceflight. However, spaceflight and the utopian potential of outer space were already topics of popular discussion in the late nineteenth century, when calls by German astronomers for speculative restraint were challenged in popular science accounts and fantasy literature. Mass-produced fiction in the first decade of the twentieth century increasingly depicted spaceflight as a technological vision, imagining the spaceship as the successor to the airship. While exploring the historical processes behind this ascent of plausibility of futuristic design, the article shows how popular science media gave public voice to both established and new professional elites and fostered interprofessional exchange. In the 1900s spaceflight developed into a popular theme and boundaries between fiction and popular science blurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]