History and Historiography of Science

Merton, the DSB, and the Failed Digital Humanities of the 1960s

Following up on a reference in Gieryn 1982, I’ve been reading over Robert K. Merton’s long essay, “The Sociology of Science: An Episodic Memoir,” in The Sociology of Science in Europe (1977), pp. 3-141.  I’ll post more on it soon in the context of other recent posts on this blog.  For the moment, I’ll just say that the essay is thin on “norms”, “counter-norms”, “ambivalence”, etc.  It is mainly about the intellectual influences on the sociology of science that developed in the 1960s and ’70s.  It is also about the methods, ambitions, and projects of what Merton still regarded as a nascent discipline. It turns out these projects are well worth a tangential post, or two.

In this post, I want to focus on Merton’s account of his involvement with the planning of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (DSB), and the computerized “data bank” that didn’t accompany it.

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Clifford Geertz on “Ideology” as an Analytical Term, Pt. 2

This post continues Pt. 1 of a look at Clifford Geertz’s “Ideology as a Cultural System,” first published in Ideology and Its Discontents, ed. David E. Apter (Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), pp. 47-76.

But, before returning to Geertz, I’d like to detour for a quick look at Erik Erikson (1902-1994).  In addition to being a psychologist, Erikson was part of an illustrious club of postwar intellectuals.  His Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958) was cited in a particularly broad literature in the ’60s and ’70s (here’s the Google ngram for “Young Man Luther”), and he was particularly important in establishing “identity” as a term of analysis.  Here’s his take on “ideology” and its relationship to “identity” from the introduction to that book (22):

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Clifford Geertz on “Ideology” as an Analytical Term, Pt. 1

Clifford Geertz (1926-2006)

I suspect most historians, including myself, could not say much about the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s work and ideas beyond the two-word phrase “thick description”.  Yet, almost all historians will know at least that much.  Further, although he borrowed the phrase from Gilbert Ryle, these historians will likely associate the phrase with Geertz, probably because at some point they have read his 1972 essay “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”.  As an undergraduate history major, I was assigned it as part of my senior year methods course.

I would argue that most historians know about thick description, as exemplified in “Deep Play”, because it has become integral to our sense of professional identity.  It articulates what we have the ability and freedom to do, which others cannot (or, for ideological reasons, do not) do.   This identity identifies historians as reliable experts at getting beyond the surface features of a culture and teasing out the hidden values and presuppositions lurking within its more visible elements: its texts, its propaganda, its day-to-day practices, its objects, and so forth.

Unfortunately, this skill is often treated as a kind of secret, to which historians simply gain access upon induction into the historians’ guild by reading works like “Deep Play”.  Once in, you need not worry too much about what actually constitutes legitimate and valuable interpretations of past cultures.  (My bête noire is historians’ continued belief that “scientism” and “technological enthusiasm” constitute legitimate characterizations of the rationales in certain technical and political cultures.)

We could doubtless benefit from reading more of Geertz on the proper interpretation of culture.  This post is about his essay, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” first published in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David E. Apter (Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), pp. 47-76, which still bears sober reading a half-century later.

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Agricultural Colleges in Britain

Studley Castle Horticultural College for Women, 1910.
Source: Windows on Warwickshire (click for original)

Update: Carrie de Silva of Harper Adams University College has assembled a more complete and thorough list than the one which appears below.  It is available online in pdf here.  Like the list below, she emphasizes that her chronology is tentative, and is open to correction.

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A few weeks ago, I spent some time chopping together a list and outline history of the various agricultural colleges founded in Britain and Northern Ireland, generally culled from various sources on the internet.  I have fairly reliable foundation dates for all but a few.  The actual names of the institutions are harder to nail down, because not only did they change, but they seem to have been referred to variously by the name of the county in which they were located, the farm on which they were built, or perhaps the village or town which they were near.  Further, sometimes a generic name like “farm institute” will be applied to a place that’s really maybe called an “agricultural college” or “farm school”.  But, rather than wait to polish all this up through intensive research, I’ve assembled my tentative list in this post in case it may be of use to anyone.

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Thomas Gieryn’s Criticism of Post-Mertonian Science Studies

This post is about: Thomas Gieryn, “Relativist/Constructivist Programmes in the Sociology of Science: Redundance and Retreat” Social Studies of Science 12 (1982): 279-297.

The richness, honesty, and critical depth of many of the debates in the social studies of science in the late ’70s and early ’80s continues to surprise me, since their full contours were not very well preserved in later rehearsals.  In this blog’s most recent swing through this history, we noted Harry Collins’s early-’80s articulation of a “methodological relativism” which sought to develop a pure sociology of scientific knowledge unburdened by epistemological baggage.  This program contrasted with Karin Knorr Cetina’s belief that the pursuit of general sociological knowledge was unlikely to turn up much, and that the way forward was in localized ethnographic studies.

Now, I have always just assumed that the sociologist Thomas Gieryn identified with such radical (if divergent) postures.  Gieryn pretty much initiated the still-popular strategy of analyzing “boundaries” in science studies.  And, in the 1983 article in which he did so, he made explicit use of Michael Mulkay’s argument that science’s Mertonian “norms” were mainly rhetoric that scientists used to establish an “ideology” around themselves.  Although I did not suppose Gieryn so radical as Mulkay, I did not expect what I found in Gieryn 1982  — an energetic criticism of Collins’s “relativism”, of Knorr Cetina’s “constructivism”, and of any pretensions that sociology was making a radical escape from the program of Robert Merton.

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The Mirrored or the Integrated Image? Beyond the Cult of Invisibility

Having outlined and criticized a style of historiographical work, labelled the “cult of invisibility” in Pt. 1, Pt. 2, and Pt. 3, this final post enumerates some of the effects of writing in this style, and how to move beyond it.

The central characteristic of the cult of invisibility is its method of proceeding by identifying prejudices — intellectual, ideological, what have you — that prevent aspects of history from being seen, or interpreted correctly.  One key implication is that diagnosing these prejudices opens a path to a more proper historiography.  But can it?

Highly visible, but not necessarily well understood

One way of approaching the question is to consider to what extent we have a proper historiography of topics that are clearly “visible”.  David Edgerton’s emphasis on how little we know about twentieth-century Britain as a scientifically and technologically sophisticated nation with a powerful military has been very influential on my thinking on this problem.  I’d also include here Sven Beckert’s work in illuminating the history of wealthy men in 19th-century New York City.

At this point, though, it is crucial not to suppose that the problem with the cult of invisibility is that it somehow renders formerly visible topics invisible in a kind of reverse discrimination against “official” or culturally “dominant” history.  The real problem is in how historians deal with empirical knowledge of history by mistaking visibility for knowledge.  This is a problem that pertains almost equally to “visible” and more classically “invisible” topics.  Notably, Edgerton (whose office is actually next door to mine, so we talk about this stuff often) will also be happy to tell you about how little we know about the use of established technologies in poorer nations.

Now, Edgerton will also go on to tell you that we know little about technology use in poorer nations because “technology” is too often taken to mean high technologies, novel technologies, or invention.  This observation is, I think, correct, but I would like to put it aside, because it is — just like this series of posts — typical of the style of argumentation that prevails in the cult.  It is another case of identifying an intellectual prejudice that prevents the historiography from rendering a topic properly visible.

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The Repetitious Image: History-Writing and the Cult of Invisibility, Pt. 3

I argued in Pt. 1 of this series that historians routinely formulate research projects, and present their findings in such a way that it stresses their work’s ability to overcome intellectual or ideological prejudices that systematically prevent aspects of the past from being seen or, at least, properly understood; this is the “cult of invisibility”.

In Pt. 2, I argued that the goal of historians’ writing seems to be to produce a “sublime image” — a product that in its scope and form reflects the critical insights, which allow historians to reveal invisible aspects of the past.  Unfortunately, these writings do not easily cohere into an integrated and cumulative “understanding” of the past.

These works are typically written in a style apparently designed to introduce a critical insight permitting previously invisible aspects of the past to be seen, not to capitalize on these insights.  Most of the time, the critical insights deployed do not claim to be particularly original.  The result is the accumulation of generally competent studies with repetitive argumentative structures, which treat varied, but ultimately fragmented subject matter.

I tend to think the persistence of this style of work and presentation is mainly habit and tradition, deriving from the period in the ’70s and early ’80s when various post-Marxist critiques were fairly novel to historians.  But recent work lacks the programmatic clarity of that era — for both better and worse.  However, this post presents a few fairly satirical guesses as to why we might tell ourselves working in this way makes sense today.

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The Sublime Image: History-Writing and the Cult of Invisibility, Pt. 2

As these things are wont to do, this post has ballooned on me, so it will end up being 3 or 4 shorter parts.

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The power and appeal of the cult of invisibility is in the fact that its central insights are more-or-less correct.  How the past is viewed and not viewed is powerfully impacted by the way in which the (often-tacit) ideas are structured, which determine what we imagine the past looked like and why it unfolded in the way that it did.

Furthermore, because we correctly suppose that “culture” is central to why events unfold in one way and not another, it is should not be too surprising that the ideas we use to analyze the past often turn out to be closely related to the past and present cultural ideas that govern how people behaved and behave in politics and in society more generally.  This almost insidious intertwining of analytical and cultural ideas means that historians must constantly exercise a strong critical faculty in our efforts to interpret the historical record.

Thus, in opening a critique of the cult of invisibility, I am not criticizing critical history itself.  If anything, I would complain that — important exceptions aside — historians’ present critical standards are much lower than they were between, let’s say, 1965 and 1990.

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The Revealed Image: History-Writing and the Cult of Invisibility, Pt. 1

I’ve tried to swear off abstract historiographical theorizing in favor of somewhat more specific projects like my “tactile history” series, but old habits die hard.  This post is basically an attempt to pull together some persistent themes from this blog for my own benefit, but it may be of use to others.

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Although there exists a certain amount of “philosophy of history,” in my experience it is generally now accepted that history-writing has no set philosophy or methodology.  (That would make it a “science”, and boo on that).  Philosophers will be apt to tell you that where practitioners, e.g. historians, follow no explicit methodology, they are probably following one implicitly.  The validity of such a notion for history shows through in professional historians’ zeal for methodological reflection (if not actual philosophizing), and in a pronounced peevishness toward the methodological failures of non-professional writings on history.  The philosophers will probably also go on to say implicit methodologies may well not conform to ones that practitioners would approve of if they were faced with an explicit articulation of it.  Hence the need for philosophers.

So, what methodology do historians implicitly follow?  After much reflection on this blog, I’ve come to describe it as a “cult of invisibility”.  I use the term “cult” here half-facetiously.  I don’t really mean to connote a kind of nefarious and secretive conspiracy.  However, I believe historians do by and large abide by a set of doctrines, which carry a strong moral resonance.  Further, these doctrines characterize historians’ special ability to “see” invisible things.

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The Discordant Image: Metaphors, Mentality, and the Diagnosis of Human Failure

Earlier this year, Alex Wellerstein posted at his terrific new blog, Restricted Data, about the use of liquid metaphors to describe how information spreads (it “flows”, “leaks”, etc.), and historians’ analysis of metaphors in general.  It got me thinking again about an image I’ve run across in my archival research that has long fascinated me, but that probably won’t make it into anything I publish:

My fascination with the image arises from the nature of the document in which I found it: “Analysis of Incendiary Phase of Operations, 9-19 March 1945,” a summary report prepared by Maj.-Gen. Curtis LeMay’s staff in the XXI Bomber Command (from Folder 3, Box 37, Papers of Curtis E. LeMay, Library of Congress, Washington, DC).

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