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New book: Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures

Posted by on July 31, 2017 in archival research, archives, DATA, Publication, research

New from University of Chicago Press is Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures edited by Lorraine Daston (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin).

From the publisher’s website: Science in the Archives is “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

Preface

Introduction: Third Nature
Lorraine Daston

I. Nature’s Own Canon: Archives of the Historical Sciences
1. Astronomy after the Deluge
Florence Hsia
2. The Earth as Archive: Contingency, Narrative, and the History of Life
David Sepkoski
3. Empiricism in the Library: Medicine’s Case Histories
Andrew Mendelsohn

II. Spanning the Centuries: Archives from Ancient to Modern
4. Archiving Scientific Ideas in Greco-Roman Antiquity
Liba Taub
5. Ancient History in the Age of Archival Research
Suzanne Marchand
6. The Immortal Archive: Nineteenth-Century Science Imagines the Future
Lorraine Daston

III. Problems and Politics: Controversies in the Global Archive
7. The “Data Deluge”: Turning Private Data into Public Archives
Bruno J. Strasser
8. Evolutionary Genetics and the Politics of the Human Archive
Cathy Gere
9. Montage and Metamorphosis: Climatological Data Archiving and the U.S. National Climate Program
Vladimir Janković

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
Rebecca Lemov
11. An Archive of Words
Daniel Rosenberg
12. Querying the Archive: Data Mining from Apriori to PageRank
Matthew L. Jones

Epilogue: The Time of the Archive
Lorraine Daston