HIST620/Class notes

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HIS 620

• “Seeing Science and Technology on the Move, 1500–Present”
  • Science, Visual Culture, Mobility
• Professors Daniela Bleichmar and Vanessa Schwartz
• Fall 2011, Tuesdays, 2–5pm
• Huntington Library, Seaver 3 Classroom

Office hours

• Vanessa prefers "traffic busting" office hours immediately after seminar on Tuesday, if not - Peet's in Pasadena
• Vanessa also on campus all Thursdays, SOS 170 by appt
• Daniela, VKC 344, Mon 2-4, also available on Wed by appt

Books

• Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius, or, The Sidereal Messenger [1610], ed. Albert Van Helden (University of Chicago Press, 1989)
• Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye. A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)
• John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

Contents 1 Aug 23 Introduction 1.1 Readings 1.2 BBC radio vignettes 1.3 Closing thoughts 1.4 Jump offs 2 Aug 30 2.1 Housekeeping 2.2 Hairspray dance clip 2.3 Key takeaways from the reading 2.4 Latour 2.5 October roundtable 2.6 Geyer & Bright 2.7 Transitioning to Cresswell 2.8 Bringing Greenblatt into the mix 2.9 Jump offs 3 Sept 6 3.1 Overview of Berndi collection 3.2 Archive jump offs 3.3 Opening discussion ... 3.4 Jump offs 4 Sep 13 4.1 Sources 4.2 Jump offs 5 Sept 20

Aug 23 Introduction

Research cluster Science, Technology, & Society

• People trying to create intellectual community on these topics
• Grad fellowships for summer research
• VSGC graduate certificate precedes the creation of this group

Why Huntington?

• Dibner collection started by an inventor/engineer
• Huntington was a railroad magnate, considerable materials on transportation, mobility

Daniela Bleichmar

• Trained in History of Science, working in Visual Culture
• Spanish world, Early Modern Period (1500-1800)
• 18th c. expeditions, artists/scientists traveling together
• Edited book called Collecting across cultures
• Objects in motion (natural, scientific) in early modern hispanic world

Vanessa Schwartz

• Latest book Modern france
• Current major research project: "Dawn of the jet age"
  • Writing essay for the Getty about LAX
• Also writing about kinetic art
• Also curious about new TV show Pan Am
• Co-editing volume with Hill on photo-journalism
  • Early 20th c. photojournalism
  • How did they get around? How did they circulate their film, prints?
• Previously written about mobility and paparazzi (riding around on mopeds)

Blackboard

• Fundamental part of the class
• Post by 8pm Monday
• 250-500 words
• Open-ended but can be synthesis of readings
• Expectation: students read one another
• Don't just take things apart; put them together

Ground rules

• Consciousness about air-time; many class members

Readings

Context

• What is ISIS?
  • Official journal of the history of science society
• What is the "Focus" section?
  • Short position papers, manifestos
• Maybe we are the wrong audience?
  • Preaching to the choir

"The illustration fallacy"

• Images as "making real" (Wise)
• Making the argument with the image, not just illustrating
• Are they "just pretty pictures"?

High/low distinctions, hierarchies of science imagery

• "Popular",
• Teams/individuals

Durability of images as communicative symbols

• Contingent on cultural context
• Do they "work" across various boundaries (including temporal)?

"Visual knowing" alongside "ideational knowing"?

• Distinction between images as objects and as representations

Tucker: "science of" / "science in" the photos

Is the medium of film is too popular for science (Landecker)?

"Peer collecting" (Tucker, 117)

• Popular, amateur, consumer, user

Historians of science, and of visual culture have similar backgrounds, "agendas"

How spectacles were experienced by their own audiences (Morris, 104)?

• Not as milestones en route to 20th. c. cinema
• Role of education (in contrast to magic?)
  • Illusion not intended to trick
  • Realistic representation intended to confer information
  • To fool the eye and tell you why/how it was fooled

Absences? Science before the Enlightenment?

• Not just spectacle
• "Real scientists" are doing visual presentations for each other
• "Epistemological stakes of the visual" in modern science
• This is a response to people who talk about equations, experiments, data and overlook role of visual materials

Smith: "Natural philosopher" takes on the artisan's method

• Adapting techniques developed in art
• This is the move from "natural philosopher" to scientist

Historiographic methods

• Historians of science are historians first
• Do their historical methods tend toward the scientific?
• Prevalence of different methods in various subfields?

BBC radio vignettes

Chronometer

• Harrison, the named inventor
• Development of time pieces, time keeping, synchronization
• Prize to whoever came up with the problem of time keeping, longitude

"Invisible technician"

• Re: Becker, art as collective activity

Recurring themes

• Cultural exchange, materials
• No object exists outside of a context
• Temporal fluidity, objects persisting through temporal periods
• Overwhelming emphasis on technology
• Transformation narratives
• Emphasis on the physical experience of this object, tangibility
  • Phenomenologist say you are human, you smell (smells)
• Religion

Does it blur tension, cover up devastation?

• Overly "tidy" story?
• A "happy ending"?

Closing thoughts

OK to drop

Jump offs

• Radio communication from hq to mobile employees
  • Ships at sea, planes in the air, taxis, trucks, cops
  • Re: corona commercial of throwing the cellphone into the ocean
• ARRL EMCOMM, "a radio, a battery, and a wire"
• Common Carrier in transportation, communication

Ginzburg, C. (1991). "Clues" in Critical Inquiry.

• Diagnostic approach in contrast to scientific approach

"Invisible technician"

• Sociologists of science
• Whole teams of technicians

Aug 30

Housekeeping

Goal: working from the assigned readings

Attend the exhibit between now and next week

• For next week, post about the readings and the exhibit

Hairspray dance clip

Looking at the lyrics

• Shaking it together
• You can't stop the beat

Aestheticization of motion

Dance music as a time-based art

• Intermingled time/movement
• Looping (film loop? zoetrope?)

Key takeaways from the reading

Defining terms

• Movement, mobility
• Globalization, mundialización, (the) local, universality
• Presentism, periodization, modes of temporality
• Causality, teleology
• Arguments, methodology
• Continuity, discontinuity
• Objects of study (do certain objects imply a method?)
• Social time, social space
• Politics: freedom, agency, power
• Connectedness, networks

Latour

The 10th most cited scholar in Social science/ Humanties

"Birth of science studies", article from 1986

• Emerging from 1970s
• Responding to history and philosophy of science
  • Which was concerned with universal "truth"

SSK in Edinburgh

• Sociology of scientific knowledge
• Turn toward "truth claims", made by some scientists, accepted by other scientists as truthful
• Shapin, Leviathan..., 1984

In mid 70s, Latour is doing lab ethnography

• If you hang around with scientists, they aren't talking about truth
• They are making lots of inscriptions
• Marking things down, looking at marking instruments
• Inscription is central to the development of scientific knowledge
• Thinking about standardisation
• Leading to "actor-network theory"
• Laboratory life, 1979

How do scientists make claims that are universally valid?

In 1990s, Latour is interested in modernity, politics, science

• Scientists get to control and speak over nature
• We have never been modern, trans. 1993
• Reassembling the social, 2005

The article we read is "picking a fight" with previous scholars of science, proposing a different methodology

Previously, engineers were denigrated

• Great intellectuals did not take them seriously
• It was too "practical", "applied"
• Real knowledge and advances were in science (e.g. physics is a pre-req to construction of an airplane)
  • No Nobel prize for engineering

Immutable mobile

• Universal, recognized
• Stabilization
• Standardization
• Simplification process
  • Starting with many traces, reducing them to smaller, more manageable nuggets
• Modular, reconfigurable, interoperable

Scale

• Bringing incomparable things into compatible scale
• 1:1 map is useless (Borges)

Abstraction

• Inscribe

Useful example:

• Discovery process of "endorphine" (Latour, 44)

Citing socio-cultural history books of the early 1980s

• Capitalizing on a moment in which art historians are excited
• Using these as evidence for his own claims

Two views on modern:

• Idealist: World became modern because of the ideas of Martin Luther
  • Is there a (conservative) renewal of the history of ideas?
• Materialist: Martin Luther was able to spread his ideas because of technology
  • Esp. beginning in the 1970s-1980s
  • A "return" to material

Svetlana Alpers, art historian, cited by Latour (30)

• Art of describing, 1983, on 17th c. Dutch art
• Focus not on end-product but the process taking place
  • Beginning of the social history of art
• Expands the range of things to look at:
  • Bleeding Jesus mattered in the history of art (Italian Renaissance)
  • Now we're looking at images of more domestic work
• Baxandall, Michael. "Painting experience..."
  • "The period eye"

Is the inscription process described by Alpers like the semi-automated use of software and algorithm to process data?

• Machine vision, "the period eye"

October roundtable

October started in the 1970s

• Rosyln Krauss, Annette Michaelson
• Marxist, Leftist
• Many of them are now at Yale; or at least NY/ NJ/ CT
• Reacting to the arise of the social history of art
  • Trying to be so-called theoretical
• Certain school of contemporary art
  • "Cool"
• "Visual culture questionnaire"

Pre-globalized globalized moments

• Trade, commerce
  • Silk Road

Starting from view of "globalization" is negative

• Wood accuses art historians of being too eager to uncritically adopt the "network" conception
• Globalization is a dirty word, telos, a closed system, a one-way street

Why does this roundtable exist?

• Art historians freaking out that global art market is destroying local art
• Comparing earlier global art market to present-day

Re: Latour citing Fabian on time

Geyer & Bright

Implications of the methodology in this piece

• Emphasis on, acknowledgement of the present

Presentism

• Break from 19th c. positivist history
• All history is written from the moment in which it is written

What is the diff between a teleology and a genealogy?

• Teleology is an inevitable outcome of all history
• Genealogy is contingent

Does fear of teleology make people afraid to identify causality?

• Tech determinism in film history

Key move in cultural history

• Transition from causes+consequences to a more descriptive mode, hermeneutics
• Brings it closer to humanities and social sciences
  • In HISTORY at USC, profs can choose whether they are to be reviewed by humanities or social science board

What is a presentist point of view?

• Always keeping the present in mind?
• Awareness?
• The world's pasts are multiple and exist in the present

How do you bound the present?

• What definition is actionable?
• Where you are coming from == Who you are talking to

"World history", "global age"

• "Big swirl" over-simplifying gestures
• "Meanwhile in ..."

Geographical de-centering

• Means of dealing with problems of multiplicity, periodization

Two possible outcomes of G ∧ B:

• Comparative history of power relations
  • Still geographically rooted?
• Comparative history of mobility
  • Global history, destabilizing the geographical

Transitioning to Cresswell

Compelling narrative

Movement as a relationship of time and space

• Spatialization of time
• Temporalization of space

Mobility = movement + social meaning

• Movement is phenomena; bodies, objects moving through space
• Comparison to sex, gender
• "The wink and the blink"
• Mobility = "movement plus..."
  • "+ capital" via Bordieu, politically charged way of talking about meaning

Bringing Greenblatt into the mix

There is movement even in situations of apparent fixity

Tension of individual agency and structural constraint (251)

Once upon a time, the mobile people were suspicious, untrustworthy

• This changed - mobility signified freedom, leisure

Contingentia

• Construction of microhistories, the particular
• Gathering these projects together, identifying formal similarity

Everything is in motion

• Context is also mobile

Teleology substituted for narrative

Kenneth Clark Civilization

• Even if you disagree, you can learn to tell stories

Jump offs

Journal of History and Technology, Routledge

• Anti-society for the history of technology ("SHOT") journal
• Short pieces: how and why dealing with images are fundamental to the history of technology

Journal of technology and culture

Daniel Bryson

• Well-known art historian, plagiarist

Sept 6

Visit from Dan Lewis

• dlewis@huntington.org

At the Huntington

• Query Huntington online archives first
• Paper catalog, subject search, idiosyncratic language requires some guesswork
• Particularly strong in Proper Names
• Jenny Watts curator of photographs, jwatts@huntington.org

Jon Pierce, Bell Labs papers

• Finding aid

Marconi collection

• Correspondance w/ fiance
• Written in Morse code

Online Archive of California, OAC

• Unified catalog of many CA institutions
• "Finding aids"

Overview of Berndi collection

• Not the only history of science materials but majority
• Chronology: early modern
• History of mathematics
• History of electricity
• History of medicine, anatomy
• History of physical sciences
• History of astronomy
  • Viewing, observing, illustration, photography
• History of natural sciences, (18th, 19th, 20th c.)
• Materials based on the individual tastes of the collector
• Some materials about collecting, about Dibner
  • His own top 200 books, 1995/1980 bibliography

Money comes from patented inventions in electrical engineering

• Berndi Corporation, HQ in Norwich, CT
  • Portmanteau of his name, Bernard Dibner
• Died in 1988

Archive jump offs

• ACM History
• ARRL Archives
  • Clubs, field days, regional stuff in SoCal?
• History of FRC/FCC, is this written up?
• Bill Devereau (?) working in LA collection at Huntington
• Special collections at UCLA
• LA Times collection, company history at Huntington starting in 1882-1990s
• Smithsonian Archives
• Archive Wiki, including archival sources around the world
• 1st postal system in UK, 1840
• Scholarship on mail, trains
• Pacific Mail company archives in Huntington
• Wolfgang ?? The railway journey
• Origin of species

Opening discussion ...

Access to tools, instruments

• Who can use? Who is assumed to use?

Instrumentality

• With Painlevé, it implies an audience

Painlevé concerned that science of film undermined by "if it's cinema, it's popular"

Levels of comparison:

• Tool
• Artifact(s) of the tool, tool use
  • Drawings, photography
• Writing, output, rhetoric
• Reception, audience, reading

Comparing tools

• Painlevé's creation of film: interpretation and document in one
• Galileo is attempting to document what he observes with his instrument

Effort v. effortlessness

• Is it "difficult"?
• "Period eye"

Comparing hemorrhaging dog, sea horse

• Conveyance of information
• Conveyance of visual experience

"You should never make a film when you could make a serum"

• Does the Dog film succeed?
• Is a paper necessary?

Exoticism of the animals?

• Sea horses more remote from dogs

L'Hippocampe reveals the male giving birth

• Within a popular, romantic film
• "Captured the moment..."

Galileo is a recipe book for readers to engage in astronomy

• The films of Painlevé are so difficult to produce...

3-D modeling, simulation, animation

• Illustration returns
• Photographs are "boring"?

Camera can see what no individual can see

• Because cameras can be where no one can be
• e.g. Camera floating through space, transmitting images back home

Galileo's use of instrument: prosthetic

• Extend what the human can do
• Also "forensic"?
• "Access" to an environment that is nearby but extra-ordinary

Time, motion

• Galileo's observations taking place at a slower scale
• Painlevé negotiating with motion at a different scale
  • Prefers "real-time" to speeding up, slowing down

Soundtrack, music turns motion into choreography

Anthropomorphism

Nature science films as "great fictions"

• World-building
• Narrative construction

Jump offs

Animal behavior films contemporary with Painlevé

• Honey bees
• Geese

Sep 13

Posts:

• Not just reactions
• But why do we read this?
• How does it connect to other things we are doing in the class?

Conveying knowledge through measurement of movements

• Measurement as another (mythological) way of seeing the world

Role of maps

• For measurement
• For navigation
• To represent
• Not just about spatial relationships

"Reverse engineering" history of cartography

• Hand-offs between mythology/cartography - "mythography"

Geography

• Spatial histories
• Not just the history of space, spatial expression ("history of geography")
• "History as geography"

Cultural studies, "presentist"?

• Comparison to "cultural history"

Cosgrove argument:

• Starting with Apollo images, working backwards
• "Deep roots"

How do (historians) recognize one another?

• Method?

Sources

Originality?

• Less original because of his use of 2ndary srcs?

Gillis use of textual analysis

• Poetry and other literary sources

Examples of sources in use?

• Getting it right with Lord of the Flies
• Getting it wrong with destruction of the temple - inaccurate interpretation of a fact (26)
• Generalizations about a period and the people in it - unsatisfying type of statement (109)
• Convenient categories: "age of exploration", 1500-1800

"I didn't think about it that way until I read what they wrote ..."

• The pleasure, value in historical work...

Errors? Are they just annoying or does it ruin it?

Historian's joke: splitters, lumpers

• It's all different
• It's all the same

Atlantic civilization, Atlantic world

• The location is the ocean bounded by shores of continents
• Why limited to Atlantic?
• "Maritime" culture

Routes, roots

• Passages, access
• Challenging the fixity of islands

Doing 2 things as once

• History-history (Historicizing)
• Pleasing to more general audiences? (Phenomenological)

Cosgrove: argument about continuity

• But sensitive to change
• Not either-or

Story of change over time need not be teleological (genealogical?)

• Teleological: necessary change over time, inevitable - "it all lead up to this..."
  • e.g. Intelligent design

Interdisciplinarity

• Returning to grand narrative project

9/11 rhetoric: before and after

• Ten years after Pearl Harbor, there was no commemoration
• Why do people want to commemorate?
• Simultaneity

Identifying watershed moments, texts, figures

• Valuable exercise
• "Before..." and "after..."

"Scale" in methodology

• "Scaling up" of histories
• Giant surveys

What is at stake?

Jump offs

AHR forum on oceans

• One Atlantic, one Pacific

Lure of the sea, 1750-1840

Sept 20

Start with discussion of papers