Science in the Archives : Pasts, Presents, Futures / Lorraine Daston.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Daston, Lorraine, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Scientific archives.

Scientific archives--History.

Science--History.

Science.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (406 pages)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Archives bring to mind rooms filled with old papers and dusty artifacts. But for scientists, the detritus of the past can be a treasure trove of material vital to present and future research: fossils collected by geologists; data banks assembled by geneticists; weather diaries trawled by climate scientists; libraries visited by historians. These are the vital collections, assembled and maintained over decades, centuries, and even millennia, which define the sciences of the archives. With Science in the Archives, Lorraine Daston and her co-authors offer the first study of the important role that these archives play in the natural and human sciences. Reaching across disciplines and centuries, contributors cover episodes in the history of astronomy, geology, genetics, philology, climatology, medicine, and more-as well as fundamental practices such as collecting, retrieval, and data mining. Chapters cover topics ranging from doxology in Greco-Roman Antiquity to NSA surveillance techniques of the twenty-first century. Thoroughly exploring the practices, politics, economics, and potential of the sciences of the archives, this volume reveals the essential historical dimension of the sciences, while also adding a much-needed long­-term perspective to contemporary debates over the uses of Big Data in science.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Introduction: Third Nature / Daston, Lorraine

I. Nature's Own Canon: Archives of the Historical Sciences

1. Astronomy after the Deluge / Hsia, Florence

2. The Earth as Archive: Contingency, Narrative, and the History of Life / Sepkoski, David

3. Empiricism in the Library: Medicine's Case Histories / Mendelsohn, J. Andrew

II. Spanning the Centuries: Archives from Ancient to Modern

4. Archiving Scientific Ideas in Greco- Roman Antiquity / Taub, Liba

5. Ancient History in the Age of Archival Research / Marchand, Suzanne

6. The Immortal Archive: Nineteenth- Century Science Imagines the Future / Daston, Lorraine

III. Problems and Politics: Controversies in the Global Archive

7. The "Data Deluge": Turning Private Data into Public Archives / Strasser, Bruno J.

8. Evolutionary Genetics and the Politics of the Human Archive / Gere, Cathy

9. Montage and Metamorphosis: Climatological Data Archiving and the U.S. National Climate Program / Janković, Vladimir

IV. The Future of Data: Archives of the New Millennium

10. Archives- of- Self: The Vicissitudes of Time and Self in a Technologically Determinist Future / Lemov, Rebecca

11. An Archive of Words / Rosenberg, Daniel

12. Querying the Archive: Data Mining from Apriori to PageRank / Jones, Matthew L.

Epilogue: The Time of the Archive / Daston, Lorraine

Contributors

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2017.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 22. Okt 2019)

ISBN:

9780226432366

022643236X

OCLC:

979417667