Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures

392 Pages·2017·1.79 MB·English

by  Lorraine Daston

Science in the Archives

SCIENCE IN THE ARCHIVES
Pasts, Presents, Futures
Edited by Lorraine Daston
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2017 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical
articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427
E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2017.
Printed in the United States of America
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 43222- 9 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 43236- 6 (paper)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 43253- 3 (e- book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226432533.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Daston, Lorraine, 1951– editor.
Title: Science in the archives : pasts, presents, futures / edited by Lorraine Daston.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016028698 | ISBN 9780226432229 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780226432366 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226432533 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Scientific archives. | Scientific archives—History. | Science—History.
Classification: LCC Q224 .S35 2017 | DDC 026/.5—dc23 LC record available at https://
lccn.loc.gov/2016028698
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper).
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction: Third Nature 1
Lorraine Daston
I. Nature’s Own Canon: Archives of the Historical Sciences
1. Astronomy after the Deluge 17
Florence Hsia
2. The Earth as Archive: Contingency, Narrative, and the History of Life 53
David Sepkoski
3. Empiricism in the Library: Medicine’s Case Histories 85
J. Andrew Mendelsohn
II. Spanning the Centuries: Archives from Ancient to Modern
4. Archiving Scientific Ideas in Greco- Roman Antiquity 113
Liba Taub
5. Ancient History in the Age of Archival Research 137
Suzanne Marchand
6. The Immortal Archive: Nineteenth- Century Science Imagines the Future 159
Lorraine Daston
v
III. Problems and Politics: Controversies in the Global Archive
7. The “Data Deluge”: Turning Private Data into Public Archives 185
Bruno J. Strasser
8. Evolutionary Genetics and the Politics of the Human Archive 203
Cathy Gere
9. Montage and Metamorphosis: Climatological Data Archiving
and the U.S. National Climate Program 223
Vladimir Janković
IV. The Future of Data: Archives of the New Millennium
10. Archives-o f- Self: The Vicissitudes of Time and Self in a
Technologically Determinist Future 247
Rebecca Lemov
11. An Archive of Words 271
Daniel Rosenberg
12. Querying the Archive: Data Mining from Apriori to PageRank 311
Matthew L. Jones
Epilogue: The Time of the Archive 329
Lorraine Daston
Contributors 333
Bibliography 335
Index 381
vi Contents
PREFACE
This book is the fruit of the Working Group “Archives of the Sciences”
convened at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
(MPIWG) in the summers of 2013 and 2014. At those meetings the Working
Group presented drafts, prepared commentaries, and discussed for hours
on end. After each meeting we revised our chapters in light of specific com-
ments and criticism but also with an eye toward an emergent whole: the
aim of our discussions was not only to improve each chapter but also to
develop a shared framework for thinking about how the sciences choose to
remember past findings and plan future research.
The ubiquity and longevity of our topic, scientific archives, heightened
the challenge of forging a common way of thinking about these remark-
able transgenerational enterprises. Astronomy and medicine, anthropology
and genetics, philosophy and geology, history and meteorology— all create
and conserve precious records in the most diverse media, from papyrus to
punch cards to the electronic pulses of the digital age. The timescales of
these archives range from decades to millennia. Without any pretension
to comprehensive coverage of scientific archives, this volume nonetheless
attempts to do justice to the scope and scale of the phenomenon by delib-
erately breaching the divisions among ancient, early modern, and modern
periods, as well as between the natural and human sciences. The composi-
tion of the Working Group reflected this ambition and brought together
scholars whose paths might not have crossed in the ordinary scheme of
vii
things. This book could only have come about through a collective effort,
which in turn taxed the stamina, goodwill, and good humor of all involved.
As in the case of other Working Group volumes, this one benefited
greatly from the support of the MPIWG and its staff. We are especially grate-
ful to Regina Held, Tanja Neuendorf, and the entire staff of the MPIWG
library. Without Josephine Fenger’s careful attention to every aspect of our
book- in-t he- making, from bibliography to images, it might not have be-
come a book at all. As always, it was a pleasure and a privilege to work with
Karen Merikangas Darling and her staff at the University of Chicago Press.
We thank them, one and all, most heartily.
viii Preface
INTRODUCTION
Third Nature
Lorraine Daston
Scientific empiricism converts first nature into second nature. Under the
carefully controlled conditions of the laboratory but also in the selective
observations of the field, the teeming, tangled complexity of nature as
given is slowed down or speeded up, winnowed or enriched, measured and
modeled, probed by instruments, and translated into graphics. Indigestible
first nature becomes intelligible second nature, and the scientific work of
hypothesizing, testing, explaining, and predicting can begin.1 But once
second nature slips from science present into science past, collective em-
piricism requires a third nature: the repository of those findings of second
nature selected to endure. These are the archives of the sciences.
We are in the midst of an archival moment, simultaneously over-
whelmed by the sheer amount of available information (“drowning in
data”) and obsessed with its fragility (“the page you are looking for no lon-
ger exists”). New digital media conjure up Borgesian dreams of libraries with
unlimited shelf space and nightmares of irretrievable loss,2 by both inten-
tion (e.g., cyber sabotage) and inattention (e.g., incompatible software or
obsolete hardware).3 Juxtaposed bright and bleak visions of archival futures
at moments of media shift are not new; the transition from manuscript to
print in early modern Europe kindled similar hopes and fears.4 But the
speed, the scale, and the specificities of the latest media revolution matter:
more people are manipulating more information in more ways, and all at
a tempo that baffles “what next?” predictions. These are the moments of
expanded possibility that stimulate the archival imagination in both pro-
1