The End of Cyberspace

Reading, observing, and thinking

From Lorraine Daston, "Taking Note(s)," Isis 95:3 (2004), 443–448, on 444.

I would like to explore, in a tentative vein, the implications of the history of scientific reading for other, more familiar forms of scientific practice, such as observation, but also for what might be called cognitive practices: economies of attention, arts of memory, the solidification and erosion of belief. Reading is and has been for millennia so central and seminal an intellectual practice that it has long served as the principal metaphor for understanding tout court. More concretely, ways of reading, absorbed at a young age and constantly practiced, may supply the templates for other ways of making sense of objects quite distinct from the manuscript or printed page —the morphology of a plant, the trajectory of a comet, the slide under the microscope, the “reading” of an instrument. This would especially have been the case for those who —for reasons of class, gender, and the cultural status of literacy —would have learned bookish skills before or to the exclusion of manual ones. Reading practices may also mold the self of the reader, at least among those who devote many of their waking hours to intercourse with books. Despite the bibliophobic rhetoric that since the seventeenth century has upheld the study of things over that of words, portraits of scientists even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still depict their subjects with books as well as with test tubes, skulls, chemical models, and other tools of empirical inquiry. The norms of scientific publication ensure that scientists continue to read for much the same reasons they continue to write — and both incessantly. The library remains as essential to most sciences as the laboratory. What imprint do these ingrained habits leave upon the scientific reader?

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, history of science, reading

Is scanning as good as reality?

In the latest New Yorker, there's an article about L'affaire Meinertzhagen, the discovery of fabricated and sometimes stolen works in the collections of famed ornithologist and collector Richard Meinertzhagen. This bit caught my eye: one worry that scientists working to uncover the extent of Meinertzhagen's fraud in the British Museum was that their findings

might damage the collection at a time when some scientists were beginning to debate the value of keeping large collections. In the same way that card catalogues in libraries were disposed of once their contents were digitally rendered, so, perhaps, could specimens be removed from museums, once they had been digitally sampled and photographed-- freeing up valuable space for revenue-generating attractions like planetariums. "Serious people have seriously suggested that once you digitize the specimens you don't really need them," [Smithsonian ornithologist Pamela] Rasmussen told me, indignantly. "People are asking what collections are good for, why do we need to keep them?"

This is one of the more spectacular examples of the assumption that digital versions of physical objects-- particularly scientific specimens or printed works-- are just as good as the objects themselves, which is in turn an expression of the cyberspace-era notion that the digital world (or digital records) was superior to the physical world (or physical things).

Technorati Tags: digital culture, digital-physical, library