The Sciences of the Archive (2010-15)
“Data” (literally, “the givens”) is perhaps the most taken-for-granted word in all the sciences: short and unpretentious, it expresses the simplest and apparently most straightforward elements of empirical research. Whether inscribed as jottings on notecards, traces on photographic emulsions, entries in lab notebooks, or digital information, data supply the essential raw materials for all further scientific activity, from observing to theorizing. It is a category considered too basic to merit a history, too innocent to deserve a philosophy.
Yet no other aspect of science has commanded a greater commitment of ingenuity, resources, and sheer tenacity than the taking, making, and keeping of data. Since ancient times, cultures dispersed across the globe have launched monumental data-centered projects: the massive collections of astronomical observations in ancient China and Mesopotamia, the great libraries from Alexandria to Google Book Search, the vast networks of scientific surveillance of the world’s oceans and atmosphere, the mapping of every nook and cranny of heaven and earth. These projects are typically superhuman in scale, spanning continents (sometimes even galaxies) and centuries. They imply the existence of cultural continuity in the gathering and transmission of information but not always in programs of research. Unlike traditions centered on the preservation of canonical texts, the custodians of archival projects are often acutely aware that the questions of today are unlikely to be those of tomorrow. This is why collection must be compendious – who knows what future generations will want to consult? – yet at the same time flexibly organized, for the same reason.
These projects create and serve the sciences of the archive, which embrace both the human and natural sciences: history and astronomy, meteorology and archaeology. All sciences make some use of data, but the sciences of the archive are defined by it – and their practices in turn define what data means. The history of the sciences of the archives raises questions about the evolution of categories like “data”, “information”, and “knowledge”; the cultural preconditions for titanic undertakings that project themselves in imagination far into the future; the modalities of classification, from the physical arrangement of books on library shelves to the digital indexing of the data sent by space probes; the fantasy of completeness, whether expressed in a photograph or a museum collection; the techniques for registering and manipulation of information, from the table to the data base.
The history of the sciences of the archive is also a history of the cultural consciousness of time. Many data collections posit, implicitly or explicitly, the continuity of the cultural commitments that sustain them. Astronomers have for millennia envisioned themselves as members of virtual communities stretching into the remote past and future, held together by a growing corpus of observations handed down from generation to generation. National libraries and even local archives presume the existence and interest of future readers and the support of future citizens. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the sciences of the archive supplemented this sense of the longue durée with an urgent awareness of evanescence: new, ambitious documentation projects sought to preserve all that was ephemeral – customs, buildings, objects, landscapes, whole cultures – from the amnesia induced by the breathless pace of modernization. Roomfuls of photographs, films, and reports accumulated in a vast effort to document almost everything in minute detail. The modern sciences of the archive thus imagine time as an unbroken chain of transmission but also as a breathless series of discontinuous moments, the present obliterating the past.
The research project on the Sciences of the Archives (2010-15) aims to produce a history and philosophy of data: its forms, practices, techniques, and cultures. As in past projects in Department II of the MPIWG, the inquiry will be comparative, spanning diverse epochs, cultures, and disciplines. Examples of possible topics include botanical herbaria, meteorological observation networks, great libraries, photographic surveys, ethnographic collections, the Internet.
