The British-American survey of the Atlantic (1954 – 1959) as a contribution to the IGY. Each dot represents a point where data were collected on ocean temperature, salinity, oxygen content, and dissolved chemicals (Source: NOAA).

In this project I examine the politics of world-wide data collection and data exchange in the age of Cold War To do so, I reconstruct the history of the World Data Centers in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. and trace it from the organization of Data Centers during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1957-8 to their reorganization and activities after the end of the IGY. The comparative history of the World Data Centers provides a vantage point for examining the practices and the politics of global data collection as well as their transformations following the changes in the technologies of data management and in the wake of changes in the political climate, on different sides of the Iron Curtain.

The IGY represented a distinct model of Big Science, driven by data and distinguished by the emphasis placed on data collection as an end in itself. The large cooperative undertakings in the earth sciences and environmental sciences, whose motivation had been primarily to collect data on a large-scale, was not without precedents in the past. However, world-wide data collection gained momentum in the aftermath of the WWII, acquiring a renewed significance as part of Big Science in a world shaped by the Cold War. The World Data Centers were the only institutionalized form of the IGY activities and they developed, during the 1960s, into what might be called the “Archive of Big Science” -- a big distributed archive for earth sciences. The IGY Data Centers, with data coming from various disciplines subscribing to different and sometimes incommensurable standards, were presented both in the U.S. and in the U.S.S.R. as new type of archive -- a model of data organization on a large scale, as well as a model of scientific international collaboration in the charged political climate of the Cold War.