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In: Matthew Jones
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Who lets math organize their life? Drawing of the top view of the Pascaline and overview its mechanism, 1779, Oeuvres de Blaise Pascal. “…technical practices in mathematics and philosophy in turn offered important tools for cultivating truer forms of spiritual and mental nobility. These practices enabled mathematics and natural philosophy to transform, discipline, and train the intellect, the senses, and the affects, and they put these trained faculties at the heart of organizing one’s life.” (PG9-Good Life Scientific Revolution) On October 9th, 2019, Dr. Matthew Jones, visited the Mellon Sawyer Seminar group to discuss how his work in the history of science and technology relates to, makes use of, and critically examines “data” and its artefacts. Themes of collaboration and ethics are two threads that run throughout Dr. Jones’ work, though these terms take on radically different meanings as a result of shifting socio-temporal contexts. His work covers an expansive time period, ranging from early modern inventions to contemporary concerns about digital privacy and surveillance. The social nature of knowledge production and innovation were woven throughout our conversations with Dr. Jones. Highlighting collaborations between artisans and inventors in the mechanization of calculation (rather than narratives about exceptional individuals) is representative of a broader shift in historical study. Scholars from many fields have been moving away from the figure of the individual genius towards recognizing a more complicated and collaborative model of innovation. Similar reconceptions are happening within the contemporary discipline of digital humanities, as scholars strive to repatriate the credit for early experiments with computing to Read More

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In: Ted Underwood
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Ted Underwood has been poking around in the massive HathiTrust database for a few years now, and it’s taught him that libraries are anything but uniform. During his talk with the Sawyer Seminar on Friday, Sept. 20, at the University of Pittsburgh, Underwood, a professor of English and information science at the University of Illinois, pictured his child-self walking through physical libraries, looking for books. He never guessed that every other library in existence didn’t catalogue their books in exactly the same way. But, as he now works with the metadata associated with digitized books in the HathiTrust database, he’s realized the human side of library science a bit more. He’s learned quite a bit about how physical libraries operate, he admitted. While there is national coordination with Library of Congress cataloguing standards, many of the decisions are up to individual librarians, he said. Underwood was the second speaker in the Sawyer Seminar yearlong series entitled “Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) from the Quantitative to the Digital Age.” He first spoke at a public lecture on Thursday, Sept. 19, and then for Sawyer Seminar participants on Friday. Many of Underwood’s projects deal with large collections of data, including the HathiTrust database, which stores the digitized collections of several universities totaling over 17 million volumes. In the past, he and his collaborators have leveraged that data to find that the number of women writers of fiction declined from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He and his team at Illinois are mining HathiTrust for their latest Read More

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In: Matthew Edney
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A version of our world where we are not dependent moment-by-moment on GPS tracking and Location Services is quickly becoming more and more unimaginable. So it was fascinating, then, that in his September 5th and 6th talks—delivered as part of Information Ecosystems: A Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar at the University of Pittsburgh—Matthew Edney asked that audience members think critically about these various mapping services and how deeply reliant we have become on them as a source of supposed “truth.” Long before GPS—and even long before TomTom, if you’re old enough to remember those—Edney pointed out that mapping and the so-called “field” of cartography has fundamentally shaped our conceptions of the world: how we visualize and are capable of visualizing it, how we are able to move and think about moving around it, and the many iterations of land-as-property documented over many centuries of maps. Edney’s new book, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History, does an excellent job of providing readers with a timeline of then-to-now. Cartography utilizes an impressively apt epilogue to the “Introduction”: “there is no such thing as cartography, and this is a book about it.” He helpfully framed his talks with this same quotation. By “there is no such thing as cartography,” he explained, he means that what cartography as a “field” purports to be is too loosely defined, too widely varying, too steeped in political motivation to cohere as a truly organized area of thought and practice; to quote Edney again, “the ideal of cartography is the entire belief system, while cartography Read More

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In: Matthew Edney
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At first glance, the map may not look like a data-dependent project. But with Matthew Edney’s guidance, the data of cartography became clear at the inaugural Friday lunch seminar in Information Ecosystems: Creating Data (and Absence) From the Quantitative to the Digital Age. Edney, the Osher Professor in the History of Geography at the University of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine, does, however, work with data. Maps, Edney’s specialty, require a lot of data, as it turns out. And the appearance of the finished map depends on what data is collected, for whom, and why. As Johanna Drucker has reminded us, the information scholars work with isn’t given as much as taken, hence her alternate term for “data” – “capta.” That concept is clear in Edney’s work, and in the lively discussion that took place during the Sept. 6 seminar, which included Edney and more than twenty Sawyer Seminar participants from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University. Edney’s 1997 book, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843, argues that the British did not record the geographical boundaries of India so much as they invented the space called India to fulfill their imperial ambitions. His new book, Cartography: The Ideal and Its History, puts into tension the ideal of a map – that it is a completely accurate, objective representation of geography – with its reality – that it is in fact a representation of Drucker-esque capta, with all the subjective decisions that go along with amassing that capta. That’s a Read More