Like editor Daston, director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the contributors are experienced and well-regarded historians of science. Most authors focus on the biological sciences, although astronomy and paleontology are also addressed. Ownership of information and access to evidence are perennial dilemmas. Additionally, the articles consider the types of documents in which knowledge was recorded, and evaluate the consequences of ‘data deluge.’ Political controversies have arisen over how data is gathered and analyzed, perhaps particularly in those disciplines in which the science is its archive, such as evolutionary genetics and climatology. The articles explore how stores of observations were used in the past and contemplate present techniques for retrieving electronic information. “This volume’s articles deal with historically universal problems of accumulation, preservation, management, interpretation, and dissemination of data. Read More about Science in the Archives Read Less about Science in the Archives Thoroughly exploring the practices, politics, economics, and potential of the sciences of the archives, this volume reveals the essential historical dimension of the sciences, while also adding a much-needed long-term perspective to contemporary debates over the uses of Big Data in science. Chapters cover topics ranging from doxology in Greco-Roman Antiquity to NSA surveillance techniques of the twenty-first century. Reaching across disciplines and centuries, contributors cover episodes in the history of astronomy, geology, genetics, philology, climatology, medicine, and more-as well as fundamental practices such as collecting, retrieval, and data mining. With Science in the Archives, Lorraine Daston and her co-authors offer the first study of the important role that these archives play in the natural and human sciences. These are the vital collections, assembled and maintained over decades, centuries, and even millennia, which define the sciences of the archives. But for scientists, the detritus of the past can be a treasure trove of material vital to present and future research: fossils collected by geologists data banks assembled by geneticists weather diaries trawled by climate scientists libraries visited by historians. Archives bring to mind rooms filled with old papers and dusty artifacts.
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