Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures
Lorraine Daston
Abstract
The natural and the human sciences depend on archives just as much as they depend on the laboratory, the observatory, the field, the library, and other sites of research. For sciences that track phenomena that unfold on a superhuman timescale, such as astronomy and paleonotology, the preservation and retrieval of remnants of the past, whether in the form of observations or fossils, is a precondition for present and future research. In other sciences, such as medicine or climatology, past data may suddenly become urgently relevant when a new pattern is detected: has this disease ever been obser ... More
The natural and the human sciences depend on archives just as much as they depend on the laboratory, the observatory, the field, the library, and other sites of research. For sciences that track phenomena that unfold on a superhuman timescale, such as astronomy and paleonotology, the preservation and retrieval of remnants of the past, whether in the form of observations or fossils, is a precondition for present and future research. In other sciences, such as medicine or climatology, past data may suddenly become urgently relevant when a new pattern is detected: has this disease ever been observed before? Have rainfall patterns changed significantly in the past century? For still other sciences, such as genetics and molecular biology, genomic databases make new research programs possible. Because scientific archives are so costly in terms of the invested labor, money, and other resources, they are often the flashpoint of disciplinary disputes about access, usage, and maintenance. This volume explores the role of scientific archives in astronomy, ancient natural philosophy, medicine, genetics, paleontology, natural history, climatology, and history, as well as recent developments in the age of Big Data, including self-archiving, stop lists, and data mining.
Keywords:
scientific archives,
databases,
libraries,
Big Data,
collections,
data retrieval
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226432229 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: September 2017 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226432533.001.0001 |
