Before the Two Cultures: Big Science and Big Humanities in the Nineteenth Century

Citation preview

THE ISRAEL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

PROCEEDINGS" VOLUME IX NO. 1

Before the Two Cultures Big Science and Big Humanities in theNineteenth Century by

LORRAINE DASTON

Jerusalem 2015

The Martin Buber Memorial Lectures

Copy Editor: Deborah Greniman Production: Yehuda Greenbaum

ISSN 1565-8465

© The Israel Academy of Sciences. and Humanities, 2015 Second printing: 2015

Typesetting by Keterpress Enterprises, Jerusalem Printed at Graphos Print, Jerusalem

Proceedings of the lsrael Academy of Sciences and Humanities, IX I

BEFORE THE TWO CULTURES

BIG SCIENCE AND BIG HUMANITIES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

by LORRAINE DASTON

Introduction: Before the Two Cultures

It is a double honour to be asked to present the 2014 Martin Buber Memo rial Lecture at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities: First, the

Academy's own distinction magnifies any distinction it confers; second, the name of Martin Buber, scholar, visionary and first president of this Academy, still resonates more loudly than any other when an impasse in human relationships - intellectual, cultural, religious or political - obliges us to think about how to restart a dialogue that has broken down. The dia

logue between the sciences and the humanities, epitomized by the Acad emy'svery name, has frayed if not snapped in recent years.The humanists wring their hands over the crisis' of funding and prestige that besets their disciplines; the scientists question whether the humanities are capable of

innovation and durable knowledge. Diplomatic courtesies are still main tained at ceremonial gatherings of universities and faculties, but in commit tees that decide upon fellowships, prizes and grants, relationships are tense, and mutual sympathy and esteem dwindle. Both sides increasingly doubt whether they are truly partners in the quest for understanding - in part,

because their views of what understanding is seem so divergent. In this lecture, I would like to use history to rethink the relationship be tween the sciences and the humanities. History is not necessarily thera

peutic: Unlike psychoanalysis, it does not promise to dissolve neuroses

by discovering their origins. But it can usefully unsettle taken-for-granted assumptions

in this case, about our current classifications of knowledge

and the basis for positing "Two Cultures' of intellectual endeavour. 1

Lorraine Daston Once upon atime, but not so long ago, before there were two cultures,

there was Big Science. Or rather (to use the mid-twentieth-century lan guage of the two cultures), there was Big Science - and Big Humanities.

The humanities were in the vanguard: The Corpus Inscriptionum Latina rum (a collection of all known Latin inscriptions from Roman antiquity), begun in 1853 by the Prussian Academy of Sciences, was the prototypeof many subsequent grand undertakings, including the Carte du Ciel (an as

trophotographic mapping of the entire night sky), inaugurated at the Paris Observatory in 1887. These two projects, the one in classical philology and the other in astron

omy, were unprecedented in their grand scope, huge budgets and labour organization on an international scale. They were emblematic of the rising prestige of both fields in the nineteenth century. Their practitioners had dazzled the public with their innovative research- the philologists with de cipherments of ancient languages and reconstructions of ancient texts and artefacts, and the astronomers with sensational discoveries of new plan ets and ever more precise predictions of comets and eclipses. The Corpus

Inscriptionum Latinarum (known simply as the CIL to allscholars of clas

sical antiquity) and the Carte du Ciel were also emblematic of how the

humanities and the sciences during this period shared practices of compil ing archives for future research. Before there were Two Cultures, made

famous by C.P. Snow's Rede Lecture of that title at the University of Cambridge in 1959, there was a common culture of what I shall call the sciences of the archives.?

What are the sciences of the archives? They are those disciplines among both the human and the natural sciences that depend on collections of data

and objects in order to pursue research in the present and ensure the possi bility of research in the future. The type specimens enshrined by botanists, the core samples drilled by geologists, the ancient observations still referred to by astronomers, the data banks assembled by geneticists, the museum

collections that hold the corpora cherished by art historians and archaeolo gists, the case histories published in medical journals, the weather diaries and ships' logs trawled by climate scientists, and of course the libraries and archives visited by historians - these are the sorts of collections that define

the sciences of the archives. In the early twenty-first-century rage for Big C.P. Snow, The Tvo Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, New York: Cambridge

2

University Press, 1959; on the ensuing debate, see Guy Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain, Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Lorraine Daston, "The Sciences of the Archives', Osiris, 27 (2012), pp. 156-187.

2

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Before the Tvo Cultures

Data, we have once again entered an archival epoch in the sciences and hu

manities. But we have been there before, and there are perhaps some lessons to be learned from the frst age of Big Science and Big Humanities.

In this lecture, I will use the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum and the Carte

du Ciel, the biggest projects of Big Humanities and Big Science during

the century that invented both, to argue two theses: (1) The methods and aims of the sciences of the archives cut across the Two Culture divide; and

(2) the Big Science and Big Humanities of the nineteenth century revealed the darker side of scientific progress. What happens to eternal truths if each new advance overturns what we thought we knew?

The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum

Berlin, 1858. Roman historian Theodor Mommsen, barely forty years old, addresses the Prussian Academy of Sciences on the newly approved Corpus

Inscriptionum Latinarum.? Mommsen was not yet the celebrated scholar and statesman he would become, but he lectured the distinguished members

of the Historical-Philological Class of the Berlin Academy with serene self confidence in his ability to pull off the Herculean task of collecting all Latin

inscriptions from the length and breadth of the territory once covered by the

ancient Roman Empire and all this in four years.

Mommsen's audience of academicians must have entertained some scepti cism about his promises. After all, a comprehensive collection of ancient Latin inscriptions had already been tried and failed not once, not twice,

but at least four times, the first such effort having been the early seven teenth-century Inscriptionum antiquae totius orbis Romanae in corpus absolutissimum redactae cum indicibus XXV (1603 and later editions) of Jan Gruter, Marcus Welser and Joseph Justus Scaliger, which was outdated almost as soon as it was published, and the last a project initiated in 1843

by the French, under the protection of Minister of Public Instruction Abel François Villemain, which collapsed along with Villemain's ministry in the 3

On the CIL see Theodor Mommsen, Ueber Plan und Ausführung eines Corpus

Inscriptionum Latinarum (Acta der wissenschaftlichen Unternehmungen der phi losophisch-historischen Klasse, XVIl/a: Sammlungen lateinischer Inschriften.

1836-1848), Berlin: A.W. Schade, 1847. in Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgische

Akademie der Wissenschaften, PAW-1|-VIII.96: Adolf Harnack, Geschichte der

Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Berlin: Reichs drückerei, 1900, I/2, pp. 896-914; Theodor Mommsen - Otto Jahn: Briefivechsel 1842-1868, ed. Lothar Wickert, Frankfurt a/M: Klostermann, 1962, pp. 20-64. 4

Wilhelm Larfeld, Handbuch der griechischen Epigraphik, Leipzig: 0.R. Reisland, 1907, 1, pp. 39-67.

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Lorraw Duxton

Revolution of 1848. And then there was the Prussian Acndemy's own ear lier project on Greek inseriptions, the Corpus Inseriplhomum Grwearum:

Begun in I815under the lendership of philologist August Böckh, the irst volume appeared over a decade later in I828 and the second fifleen years

after that, in 1843. Monmmsen's cocky promise to complete the much larger

Corpus Insvcriptiomm Latinarum in only four yearsmust have greatly ir ritated Böckh, who had led the opposition to the proposed project in the Prussian Academy.

Why did Mommsen think hecould succeed where so many before him had failed? In a word, or rather two: critique and organization. Raised in the new philological religionof textualcriticism, Mommsen believed the new methods

would detect false readings and forgeries propagated, wittingly or not, by his predecesors. This would, according to his optimistic estimate, eliminate up to half of the inscriptions to be catalogued. So far, these eritical methods had

mostly been applied to published sources and, in some cases, manuscripts

especially those heldby the Vatican (though Mommsen warned that the Prus sian ambassador might have to negotiate greater access to the papal library for

Protestant scholars, as wellas longer opening hours - three hours a day was

standard- for all). But Mommsen insisted that it was necessary at some point

to leave thelibrary for the field, to return to the original inscriptions: If the editor of Livy isprepared to travel to Florence and Paris [to con sult manuscripts] for a critical edition, how can an editor of a complete critical edition of inscriptions fail to avail himself of the inspection of the stones themselves? All the more so, since he would otherwise sac

rifice one of the chief advantages of epigraphy over other literature, the indubitable, unassailable certainty of the text?% Mommsen practiced what he preached. Whereas Böckh hadn't bothered to travel even as far as Paris's museums to check Greek inscriptions (and he re garded modern Greece, newly independent from the Ottomans, as almost as inaccessible as ancient Greece), Mommsen criss-crossed Italy, often on foot

or in bone-jolting post coaches, to track down ancient inscriptions on weath ered stones in mountain villages and sleepy provincial museums." And sure 5 (Ambroise Firmin Didot), Projets et rapports relatifs d'un recueil général d'épigraphie latine, n.p. [Paris?], n.d. [1843?]. 6

7

Mommsen, Ueber Plan (above, note 3), pp. 4-8. Theodor Mommsen, Tagebuch der französisch-italienischen Reise 1844/1845,

ed. Gerold and Brigitte Walser, Bern-Frankfurt a/M: Herbert Lang, 1976, p. 190 (Fermo); Plate 3 (Castel di Sangro).

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Before the Two Cultures

enough, Mommsen's team of young philologists began to turnout volume after volume of transcribed Latin inscriptions, starting in 1863 and producing fifteen folio volumes by 1899, at a pace that Mommsen himself to factory production. Although Mommsen did not make good hiscompared promise to complete the project in four years, the steady rate of publication (and the discovery of ever more Latin inscriptions) allayed fears of the stagnation that had mired Böckh's Corpus lnscriptionum Graecarum. This was the context in which Mommsen invented Big Science (Großwis senschaft), both the word and the thing." In 1890,addressing the Prussian Academy of Sciences, which his model of ambitious projects in Altertums wissenschaft (the study of all aspects of classical antiquity) had elevated to international leadership in the field, he observed: Science [Wissenschaft, embracing both the natural and the human sciences] also has its social problem; likethe big city and big industry, big science, which cannot be achieved by the lone individual, although it can be directed by one, is a necessary element of our cultural develop ment, and one whose proper bearers are or should be the academies.9

With generous financial backing from the state, the institutional continu

ity of the academy, and industrial-type organization, Mommsen andthe

Historical-Philological Class of the Prussian Academy pioneered Big Science with project after project throughout the nineteenth century: frst

the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum,then the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, Byzantine numismatics, the prosopography of Late Antiquity, the Aristotle lexicon, and on and on.l0

8 Rüdiger vom Bruch, 'Mommsen und Harnack: Die Geburt von Big Science aus den Geisteswissenschaften', in Alexander Demandt, Andreas Goltz and Heinrich Schlange-Schöningen (eds.), Theodor Mommsen: Wissenschaft und Politik im

19. Jahrhundert, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005,pp. 121-141; Stefan Rebenich, "Un ser Werk lobt keinen Meister": Theodor Mommsen und die Wissenschaft von

Altertum', in Josef Wiesehöfer (ed.), Theodor Mommsen: Gelehrter, Politiker und Literat, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005.pp. 185-205. Theodor Mommsen, 'Antwort auf Harnack', lecture delivered on 3 July 1890 to the Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, in idem, Reden und

Aufsätze", Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1905, pp. 208-210, on p. 209. 10 Stefan Rebenich, 'Die Altertumswissenschaften und die Kirchenväterkommission

an der Akademie: Theodor Mommsen und Adolf Harnack', in Jürgen Kocka, Rainer

Hohlfeld and Peter Walther (eds.), Die Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissen schaften zu Berlin im Kaiserreich, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999, pp. 199-233.

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Lorraine Daston

As Secretary of the

Historical-Philological

Class, organization in his annual hammered addressesOrin honour of the Kaiser's birthday or of Leibniz, the Academy' s founder. ganizationin big research projects evidently bore fruit. The the Physical-Mathematical Class of the Prussian Academy members of looked on with envy and increasing alarm as, year after year, their humanist cashiered the lion's share of the Academy's budget for 1900, Arthur Auwers, astronomer and Secretary of thetheir projects." By ematical Class, was anxiously prodding his colleagues toPhysical-Math. come up with away at the theme of scientific

Mommsen

colleagues

research projects that could compete with the juggernauts already launched by the Historical-Philological Class. In principle, Auwers insisted, the nat ural scientists also subscribed tothe modelof lavishly funded big projects.

Großbetrieb der Wissenschaft, which had brought the Prussian Academy

So much fame and fortune. But in practice, Auwers admitted, they had Jef

such glittering undertakings almost entirely to the humanists,12

Auwers was not the only astronomer to have taken note of the triumphant rise of Big Science in philology. Let us now shift the scene from Berlin to

Paris. In April 1887, the Paris Observatory awaited distinguished guests: the world's astronomical elite, which expected to be wined and dined in

style.Nor were they disappointed: Nine-course banquets and evening con certs leavened the long days of deliberations on whether reflecting or re

fracting telescopes were best suited to astrophotography, how to divide up

the labour of photographing the whole sky among the eighteen participating observatories, and the merits of making a star catalogue as well as a map of the heavens.3 Admiral Ernest Mouchez and subsequent directors of the

Observatory staged the Carte du Ciel with all the pomp and circumstance of 11 Hermann Diels, Die Organisation der Wissensch¡ft, Heidelberg: Spektrum, 1993 [1906], p. 667. At least in the Berlin Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, the

number of projects conducted by the Philosophisch-Historische Klasse (including

Mommsen's) far outnumbered those initiated by the Physikalisch-Mathematische Klasse in the Kaiserreich; see Conrad Grau, Die Preußische Akademie der Wissen

schaften zu Berlin, Heidelberg: Spektrum, 1993, pp. 178-216. 12 Quoted in Grau, Die Preßische Akademie (above, note l1), p. 195.

13 On the Carte du Ciel see Suzanne Débarat, J.A. Eddy, H.K. Eichhorn, and A.R. Upgren (eds.), Mapping the Sky: Past Heritage and Future Directions, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988; Théo Weimer, Brève histoire de la Carte duCiel en France, Paris: Observatoire de Paris, 1987; and Jérôme Lamy (ed.), La Carte du Ciel: Histoire et actualité d'un projet scientifique international, Paris: Observatoire de Paris, 2008; and S. Débarat et al. (eds.), Mapping the Sky: Past Heritage and Future Directions. Proceedings of the 133rd Symposium of the International Astrophysical Union. Dordrecht-Boston-London: Kluwer, I988. 6

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Before the TwoCultures a diplomatic congress, decking the Observatory out with gleaming crystal and Sèvres porcelain, constellations of Louis XIV armchairs upholstered in red velvet and galaxies of silver candelabra, all requisitioned from offi cial state storehouses for the occasion.4 Whenever the French government balked at the mounting expenses, the Observatory director countered that the success of the project was 'a point of honour for France',15 The fifty-eight astronomers from sixteen countries plus three colonies who met in Paris planned what one contemporary called the greatest venture

yet undertaken in astronomy', namely, a complete photographic map of the sky, including all stars to the fourteenth magnitude. Only the combined

and prolonged efforts of almost a score of observatories in both the north

ern and southern hemispheres could produce what promoters hailed as an

"imperishable monument', a photographic record of 'the authentic state of

the universe visible from the earth at the close of the nineteenth century'.

The proportions of the project were indeed monumental: Eighteen obser

vatories around the world, from Helsinki at +60.9 degrees latitude to Mel bourne at -37.5, laboured for decades to amass charts projected in 1912 to

stack 32 feet high and weigh about4,000 pounds. Armed with this snapshot of the sky circa 1900, future astronomers would be able, it was hoped, to detect changes in the heavens that unfolded on too long a time scale to be perceptible within a short human lifetime - the appearance of new stars, nebulae and comets, the telltale motion of as

yet-undiscovered planets, the extended periods of variable stars, the incre mental proper motions of the so-called fixed stars. As the deliberations of

the 1887 InternationalCongress and of subsequent meetings (1889, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1909)of the Permanent Committee make clear, the intricate coordination of telescopes, photographic plates, micrometric measure ments and myriad other details to ensure that the parts of the map would

be commensurable required that participants relinquish control not only over instruments and methods, but also over their choice of research area

for years to come. By uniting astronomers around the world and across generations, the Carte du Ciel aspired to nature's own gargantuan scale -

and to global governance through the minute coordination of instruments, methods and standards.

14 'Soirées: Diners àl'occasion des réunions du Comitéde al Carte du Ciel', Biblio thèque de l'Observatoire de Paris, MS 1060.IV-A-2-3, Carton 25.

1S Admiral Mouchez., Directeur de l'Observatoire de Paris, au Ministre de l'Instruction Publique, 25 April 1891, Bibliothèque de I'Observatoire de Paris, MS 1060.IV-A-2, Carton 24.

7

Lorraine Daston The Sciences of the Archives

What the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum and the Carte du Ciel were not discoveries but the archives from which future supposed to come. The 254 volumes of data and the Were astronomical teen volumes (plus thirty of seveninscriptions - and publications, hidden in thesupplements) back rooms of observatorics behi n d thosethe and tons of glass photographic plates and thousands of paper from the ancient stones - were the squeezes taken sources that would make it possible for future astronomers and philologists to discern long-term trends in i. dereal motion or the developmnent of the Latin language. In other both astronomy and classical words philology number among the archives, What does this mean in terms of sciences of the concrete practices - in terms of what scholars and scientists actually do, and how they invest their alwavs too-scarce resources, human and financial? Once these terms, gaping holes start to emerge in the question is framed in the wall between the alleged Two Cultures of the humanities and the sciences. The main contours of our current map of knowledge were drawn in Ger many in the latter half of the nineteenth It was in the then-mighty German universities and academies thatcentury. the grand divisions between the humanities and the natural sciences, the Geistesund were first articulated, justified and Naturwissenschafien, The familiar opposi institutionalized. tion of the bookish humanities, of memory in the library, and the guardians hands-on sciences, discoverers of timeless truths in the observatory, has its roots in these mid-nineteenth-centurylaboratory and theof the disciplines,set forth by the likes of Hermann von classifications Helmholtz, Wilhelm Windelband and Wilhelm Dilthey. l6 Yet at about the same time that Helmholtz, and Dilthey were drawing bold lines between the sciences ofWindelband memory in libraries and the sciences of natural laws in laboratories and observatories, the most ad vanced scientific research institutions in Europe and North America were not only purchasing state-of-the-art instruments and building new temples

discoveriproduced es

academies,

16 Hermann von Helmholtz, Ueber das Verhältnis der

zur Gesammtheit der Wissenschaft', Akademische FestredeNaturwissenschaften gehalten zu Heidel berg beim Antritt des Prorektorats, 1862, in idem, Vorträge und Reden', Braun schweig: Friedrich Vieweg, 1903, pp. 158-185: Wilhelm Windelband, 'Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft', Rektoratsrede, Universität Strasburg, 1894, in Strasbwg Universität: Gelegenheitsschriften (1892-1896), pp. 15-41: Wilhelm Dilthey, "Der

Aufbauder geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften', Abhandlungen der

Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschafien, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Ber lin 1910, pp. 1-123.

8

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Before the Two Cultures

to science: they were locating libraries at the heart of observatories and

laboratories and busily stocking them. Take, for example, the blueprint of

the deluxe physiological institute built in Berlin for Emil Dubois-Reymond in 1877 (Figure 1). Room 17 is the main laboratory; room 7, almost as

large, is the institute library -and it is thelibrary. not the laboratory, that is right next to the director's office. The German naluralist andcxplorer Alex

ander von Humboldt, famous for his precision measurements ofeverything

from the height of South American mountains to the paths of ocean cur rents, constantly consulted his large and endearingly messy library: Note the scientific instruments scattered among the books (Figure2). For both humanists and scientists, the libraries represented past discoveries, while the archives represented the possibilityof future discoveries. Libraries and archives are the material expressionof shared practices of col lecting, collating and conserving large troves of data, whatever their form - manuscripts, books, specimens, illustrated atlases or databases. I will call this bundle the practices of compendia for short. For some sciences, such as astronomy, geology. demography and meteorology, the superhuman time

scale of the phenomena under investigation and the extreme difficulty of dis cerning subtle correlations dictate the careful preservation and consultation of past observations, from ancient Babylonian star catalogues to medieval weather diaries to parish church records of births and deaths. Without the treasures stored up in libraries and archives, there would be no way to discem

long-term trends in, say, climate or human mortality. Many other sciences depend on records because there is simply too much for any one person to observe and to know. Whatever the rhetoric of firsthand observation, the re

ality is that the modern empirical sciences have always and essentially de pended on testimony and records. " Because nature is vast and labyrinthine,

empiricism in the natural sciences is hugely labour-intensive, and therefore collective.18 The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for the humanities: The pre condition for a stable intellectual tradition is a stable collective memory, and

at latest by the sixteenth century humanists were complaining that there was

too much for any one scholar, no matter how erudite, to know alone." 17 Steven Shapin, ASocial History of Truh: Civility and Seience in Seventeenth-Cen

ury England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; see also Martin Kusch

and Peter Lipton, Testimony: APrimer', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 33 (2002), pp. 209-217.

18 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, New York: Zone Books, 2007, on 19-27, 367-368.

19 See Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

[9]

Lorraine Daston

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18S6.

Before the Two Cultures

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(11]

11

Lorraine Daston

If anything, the rise of the database and the Internet

has links between the practices of those branches of the sciences and the the

intensified

manities that depend crucially on large compendia. These data-hungry dio. ciplines often share the computer programs that structure databases and

the visualization techniques used to make sense of them. Whether a classicist is trawling the Greek and Latin corpus in the Perseus Digital Library3 (9.123.283 words at last count) for all uses of a certain word or a geologist is searching for all known fossils of acertain extinct species in the Paleo.

biology Database?" (1,054,916 taxonomic occurrencesto date), both user interfaces and search engines are remarkably similar. Moreover, there isa striking continuity between the collecting practices of the great nineteenth century museums, the atlases and other compendia published on the basis of these collections, and the dernier cridigital techniques of microbiolo gists, geneticists and paleontologists.22

Despite the hype surrounding all things digital, and the undeniably greater

capacity, flexibility and speed of computerized databases, the practices of collecting, inventorying, deseribing, image-making, collating and publish ing have remained surprisingly stable since the monumental projects of the

nineteenth century. Like the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum of the philol

ogists and the Carte du Ciel of the astronomers - and like the vast botanical collections of Kew Gardens in imperial Britain, the fossils amassed by the Paris Muséum d'histoire naturelle and the Monumenta Germaniae Historica

of the medievalists, all examples of nineteenth-century archival projects these undertakings are vast in scope, collective in authorship and long, very long, in the making. Their media are as different as the multi-volume

edition (217 volumes for the Patrologia latina), glass photographic plates (some 22,000of them for the Carte du Ciel) or drawers of fossil specimens in the world's museums (too many to count). Digitalization is only the lat est in this parade of ways to make data physical, visible, accessible and durable. 'Data-driven sciences' is the new name for those disciplines that

20 Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/, consulted 9 October 2014.

21 Paleobiology Database, http://paleodb.org/cgi-bin/bridge.pl, consulted 9 October 2014.

22 Bruno Strasser, 'Data-Driven Sciences: From Wonder Cabinets to Electronic Data

bases', Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedica Sciences, 43(2012), pp. 85-87; idem, Practices, Styles, and Narratives: Collecting in the Life Sciences', Osiris, 27 (20 12), pp.303-340; and David Sepkoski. "Towarts a Natural History of Data": Evolving Practices and Epistemologies of Data in r

leontology, 1800-2000°, Journal of the History of Biology. 46 (2013). pp. 401** 12

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Before the Two Cultures

amass and organize heaps of information on everything from biodiversity to climate change. But the practices of compendia are neither new nor the exclusive province of the natural sciences.On the contrary: As we've seen

in the case ofthe Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, the Big Humanities of

the nineteenth century paved the way.

Monuments for the Future

Classical philology and astronomy are both sciences of the archives, but not in the usual sense of historical archives. Historians consult archives in order

to investigate the past: by contrast, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum and the Carte duCiel were firmly turned toward the future. The proponents of

the Corpus 0nscriptiomum Latinarum and the Carte du Ciel described their projects as 'monunments, the modern age's answer to ancient pyramids and medieval cathedrals. The form these nineteenth-century monuments took was not architectural but archival: compendia of the working materials that nineteenth-century scholars and scientists imagined would enable their suc cessors to conduct research for centuries (if not millennia) to come. It is the foundation of historical science', Mommsen preached to his fellowaca demicians in Berlin, that the archive of the past be put in order'.23 Future

research, whatever shape it might take, would, it was confidently asserted, be made possible by the discipline's carefully assembled archive. The architects

of theCarte du Ciel hoped to hand down their astrophotographic map 'to the astronomers of the year 3000 at least' -that last qualification in deference not

to the inevitable fallof all civilizations but only to the possible deterioration of the photographic plates, 'inasmuch as today we do not know whether the chemical deposited on the glass will remain eternally unalterable'2* In the imagination of their founders, the archives were forever.

By contrast, the results of scienceand scholarship were all too ephemeral at least, that seemed to be the moral drawn from the accelerating pace of

progress in both realms by the mid-nineteenth century. Already by the 1820s, the classical philologists had begun to worry about being surpassed

and, still worse, forgotten by their own students, as new discoveries and

critical methods overflowed the pages of the new journals established to 23 Theodor Mommsen, 'Antrittsrede', delivered 8 July 1858 to the Königliche Preus

sische Akademie der Wissenschaften. in idem. Reden und Aufsätze (above, note 9). Pp. 35-38, on 37. 24 E.B. Mouchez to David Gill, 30 April 1887. Bibliothèque de l'Observatoire de Paris, MS IV.A, 'Comité international de la Carte du Ciel', carton 7.

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Lorraine Daston

publish them at afaster clip than traditional book presses could maintain 2:

Afew decades later, their colleagues in the natural sciences

feel time's hot breath upon their necks. By 1844, Alexanderalsovonbegan Humto boldt reflected sadly that all that is connected with empiricism and wisL

fathoming of phenomena and physical law takes on a new aspect in a few decades, [...] so that as one commonly says, outdated scientific writings fall into oblivion as [no longer] readable'. By 1900, the tempo of scientifc

advance had quickened to the point that French applied mathematician an

physicist Henri Poincaré could write elegiacally of how ephemeral scien. tifictheories had become, of 'ruins piled upon ruins' 7

This is the background against which the tremendous disciplinary exertions of the nineteenth-century sciences of the archives on behalf of the future

become comprehensible. The scale of cost and commitment demanded by

the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarumn and the Carte du Ciel were unprec

edented: projects conceived on the scale of a decade, extended to a century

or more; budgets endlessly revised, always upward; careers dedicated to undertakings that outlasted individual lifetimes and subordinated individu al ambitions to the needs of the disciplinary collective - and not the actual collective of one's here-and-now colleagues but the envisioned collective

of future astronomers and classical philologists. The investments in time, talent and money were enormous; the sacrifices, especially for the astrono mers, were even greater. The finest young philologists were sent out to

transcribe inscriptions in regions where they faced danger and even death

(one of Mommsen's predecessors, the young Danish philologist Olaf Kell ermann, had died of cholera in Rome while gathering inscriptions²9). Ob

servatories pledged to the Carte du Ciel tied up resources that could have been used for new instruments and research initiatives for decades to come.

Australian observatories,which had shouldered the burden of mapping the largest portion of southern hemisphere stars (18% of the entire sky), missed

out on most of twentieth-century astrophysics and spectroscopy.

Nineteenth-century archival projects like the Corpus Inscriptionum 25 R. Steven Turner, 'Historicism, Kritik, and the Prussian Professoriate, 1790-1840. in M. Bollack and H. Wismann (eds.), Philologie et herméneutique au 19e siecle.

Göttingen: Vanderhoek &Ruprecht, 1983, pp. 450-489.

26 Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos, Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1874 [1844], 1. p. xxiv. 27 Henri Poincaré, La Science et l'hypothèse, Paris: Flammarion, 1968 [1902]. P. l13. 28 Mommsen feared a similar fate ifhe stayed in Italy: idem, Tagebuch (above, note 7 p. l68.

29 Graeme L. White, The Carte du Ciel: The Australian Connection', in Suzaie

Débarat, J.A. Eddy, H.K. Eichhorn and A.R. Upgren (eds.), Mapping the Sky: re Heritage and Future Directions, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988, pp. 45-51, on p. 48. 14

[14)

Before the Tvo Cultures

Latinarum and the Carte du Ciel stamped the model of the most presti gious, expensive and longue durée science for ever after. And I do mean

longue: the Carte du Ciel was peremptorily ended (not completed) in 1970, almost a century after it began: the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum is stillongoing. Since their inception, regimes have risen and fallen, and both Prussia and the Troisième République have disappeared; two World Wars laid waste to large parts of the globe: economic, technological and political pressures have transformed science and scholarship: and astronomy and

classical philology have undergone their own intellectual revolutions. Yet these projects survived. What justified such colossal commitments, more binding than treaties, more long-lasting than nations, more costly than even the most extravagant monument in brick and mortar, concrete and

steel? Amidst a century strewn with failures in global governance, from the

League of Nations to the world climate conferences, how did these interna tional collaborations endure? Above all, why labour for an uncertain future,

at the expense of an urgent present? Tocreate and curate an archive is to assume disciplinary continuity, some

times across centuries or even millennia. There is alwaysa utopian ele ment in the sciences of the archives, a vision of a community that will endure and cherish the collections so carefully laid up as provisions for future research. Yet in the mid-nineteenth century, when the sciences

of the archives invented Big Science and Big Humanities, the rosy vi sion of science stretching into the far future was shadowed by fear - not

that science and scholarship would disappear or fail, but rather that they might succeed too well. By 1850, scientific progress had accelerated to a dizzying tempo: Today's established truths could so quickly become to morrow'serrors, and scientific revolutions occurred even more frequently

than political ones. Sooner or later, every scientific doctrine would give way to another. The initiators of the first Big Science and Big Humanities projectswere haunted by the spectre of their own obsolescence; they were already looking over their shoulders, afraid of being overtaken by their students. Better to invest in building firm foundations for future science than in the flimsy structures of the present. Only the archives endured, a

legacy of present science to its posterity. This is the paradox of the first waye of Big Science: Never before had

the natural and human sciences advanced at such breakneck speed; never

before had humanists and scientists dared to conceive such gigantic proj ects, spanning continents and generations; never before had governments invested so heavily in the sciences; and never before had the sciences been so prestigious as proofs of cultural superiority. Yet the price of all this glit tering success was gnawing uncertainty. Would anything from the scientific [1s]

15

Lorraine Daston present be salvaged for the scientific future, or would

it

all be like the science of past centuries or indeed. of past decades? ent science could secure for the future were no longer eternal

the eternalarchives.

fWhatorgotpren,es-

truths, only

Conclusion: Beyond the Tvo Cultures At the outset of this lecture, I advanced two theses, one about ho.

might rethink the classification of knowledge, and the other about the more melancholy side of fast-spaced advances in science and The time has come to review both theses in light of the first wave of Big H-

scholarship.

manities and Big Science in the nineteenth century.

First. the classification of knowledge: Most current ways of dividing un Systematic knowledge are based on subject matter: The natural sciences

study the natural realnm, while the humanities (and the social scienee

study the human realm. These divisions are mirrored in the physical organj

zation of buildings on modern university campuses, so that they are traced

by our feet, day in, day out. They chart the relationships of both literal and figurative distance between disciplines, determining which colleagues we see regularly and which we see hardly ever.

Aglance at a typical arrangement of buildings and faculties (Figure 3) con firms what most of us take for granted: Mathematics is close to physics; physics and astrophysics occupy the same building; the music centre is very far away from all of them. If this were a medieval university (and if medieval universities had had campuses), things would have looked rather

different: Astronomy, mathematics and music would have been clustered

together, as disciplines of the quadrivium, while physics would have been elsewhere, housed with philosophy, the study of universal causes. History.

biology and geology would have shared quarters, since all were concemed with particulars (historia,as in both 'history' and 'natural history' ). Nowa

days, however, we are not surprised to see that the History and Languag*

Corners of the Stanford University Quadrangle are close tothe library. 0r

that the laboratory sciences flock together as birds of a feather on the of

posite side of the campus. Rendered in brick and mortar, in mock Gon (or, in Stanford's case, Mission Revival), these are the classifications knowlknowledge that guide our steps and our assumptions about what edge is; they map its great continents, its large and small provinces and u

Oceans that separate them. attention I have argued that we would drawthis map differently if we paid have specifically,. what I

to practices rather than to subject matter. More sciencess/humanities called the sciences of the archives straddle the natural 16

[16]

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17

Lorraine Daston

divide. Whether the archive is arepository of books or of the practices that it fosters are remarkably long-lived and the eighteenth-century Linnaean herbariumto the From Corpus lnscriptiomm Latinarun to thetwentyy-first-century Search Database, from botany to classical philology to genetics, very similar nra tices of collection, compilation and collation tunnel straight

dat a bases, widespread.

nineteenth-centNucluryeotide

wallthat allegedly divides the humanities from the sciences. through the This is not an argument for erasing all distinctions. The practices of com-

pendia by no means exhaust the practices of either the humanities or th. sciences: Interpretation, experimentation, modelling, commentary, mea

surement, translation, graphing, computer simulations, note-taking. statie tical inference - the list of learned practices is long and diverse, and not all of them are common to both the humanities and the sciences, Indeed very few, if any, are common to all of the humanities or all of the sciencee

Moreover. in both the humanities and the sciences there are disciplines and sub-disciplines in which the practices of compendia play only aminor role - for example, philosophy and theoretical physics. Nor do the practices of compendia define what it is to bea science, for anyone except the most ardent positivists. The gigantic efforts and expense required to assemble compendia whether of Latin epigraphs, fixed stars or genomes - are never justified as ends in themselves." Rather, they are always the means to broader, deeper research: hence the metaphors of 'granaries', treasur ies', 'corpora', 'sources', 'banks' or bases'. They are the provisions upon which one draws and the foundations upon which one builds, the alpha, not the omega of research in both the sciences and the humanities.

This brings me to my second thesis. When do the sciences and the humani

ties channel their energies into monumental archival projects like the Cor

pus Inscriptionum Latinarum or the Carte du Ciel? Or, to repose the ques

tion in other terms: When does the promise of future research overwhelm the attractions of present inquiry? At least in the case of the nineteenth century sciences of the archives, I have argued that the answer lies in the bittersweet realization that knowledge that progressed was knowledge that

would not, could not, should not last forever - or even for the span of a 30 Daher bleibt der Großbetrieb der Akademien selbstverständlich auf Unternehmunt gen gerichtet, deren Methode und Ziel feststeht, die aber Ausdauer, Kenntnis und vor allem reiche materielle Mittel zur Ausführung verlangen. Was auf diese we zustande kommt, ist in der Regel nicht selbst Wissenschaft der höchsten Potenz. sondern vor allem Mittel zum Zweck, Erleichterung und Sicherung der von hicru

weiter Strebenden, Logarithmentafel für die höhere Wissenschaft'. Hermann Diels.

Die Orgunisation der Wissenschafi, Heidelberg: Spektrum, 1993 [1906]. p. 68. 18

[18]

Before the Tvo Cultures single scientific career. At the moment when the prestige of classical philol ogy and astronomny was arguably at its zenith, as witnessed by the willing ness of governments to invest princely sumsin archacologicalexcavations,

mammoth telescopes, globe-spanning expeditions and other undertakings, both disciplines turned their attention from the discoveries of the present to the archives of the

future. These were monuments that would transcend the labours and lifetime of any one individual, works and legacies for future

generations or so it was devoutly hoped. The word 'devoutly' is used advisedly here. The the only institution tomobilize nuns for the task ofVatican Observatory was measuring Carte du Ciel photographic plates,"but the displaced language of religious commitment, of selfless und unstinting labour in the service of the was ubiq uitous anmong the project's moving spirits. Conjuring hereafter, up mids, cathedrals and other architectural grandiosities that images of pyra enlisted armies of anonymous, dedicated labourers, proponents of the sciences of the archives appealedlate-nineteenth-century to that which endured after time had erased allother traces of civilizations past. Notwithstanding all the positiv ist bombast that surrounded these gigantic projects to compile thousands of Latin inscriptions or millions of star positions, melancholy lurked at their heart: RecallPoincaré's mournful metaphor of 'ruins piled upon ruins' We are once again in the midst of an efflorescence of the sciences of the archives, now known as Big Data or Digital Humanities. Once again, am bitious, expensive projects for the collection of all manner of corpora and the compilation of all manner of sources are on the agenda, now under the guise of digitalization and data-mining. Once again, utopian hopes are invested in the institution charged with ensuring the survival of the ar chives - for Momnmsen, the academy; for us, the Internet. Once again, the promises made for these projects are in the future tense: Only after we have digitized (so one reads in grant proposal after grant proposal) will we be able to hypothesize. There is no more reason to doubt these promises than those of the Corpus Inscriptioum Latinarum (a tool still in daily use by scholars of all aspects of the ancient Roman world) or the Carte du Ciel (which furnished some of the evidence for the existence of dark matter). But perhapsonce again there isreason toask what nagging uneasiness has shifted our collective gaze from science present to science future, from what we think we know now to what we hope we (or rather, our successors) will know in the future.

31 Ileana Chinnici, 'La Carte du Ciel: Genèse, Déroulement et Issues, in Lamy, Carte du Ciel (above, note 13), pp. 19-43, on p. 38.

[19]

19

Lorraine Daston

Lorraine Daston is Director at the Mux Planck Institute for the of Science, Berlin, and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought utHistory the of Chicago, Her recent publications include OObjectivity (with Peter Galison, 2007) and Histories of Scientific Observation (co-edited with Elizaheth Lunheck, 2011), as well us essavs on the history of scietific fucts, ohjectivity, curiosity, probabiliy und attention,

University

which have appeared in various journals and collections. The lecturewas delivered on 21 October 2014.

D"DNp Da1bibpn bw (robn mannen sN) Inscriptionum Latinarum .nw) D10y 57y nn),D11NDOR7 5w (DUn Nn) Carte du Cielm

20

[20]

THE ISRAEL ACADEMY OF SCIENCESAND HUMANITIES PROCEEDINGS

Volume Seven

1 G.H. HARTMAN, The State of the Art ofCriticism. 1987. 19 pp. 2 H.B. RosÉN, Early Greek Grammar and Thought in Heraclitus - The Emergence of theArticle. 1988. 42 pp. 3 S. PINES, Points of Similaritybetween the Exposition of theDoctrine of the Sefirot in the Sefer Yezira and a Text of the Pseudo-Clementine

Homilies The Implications of This Resemblance. 1989. 80 pp. 4 J. AsSMANN, Akhanyati's Theology ofLight and Time. 1992. 34 pp. 5 H. DAIBER, What Is the Meaning of and to What End Do We Study the

History ofIslamic Philosophy? The History ofa Neglected Discipline.

1998. 23 pp. GooDMAN, Josephus and Variety in First-Century Judaism. 2000. M. 6 13 pp. 7 H.M. CoTTON and W. ECK, Governors and Their Personnel on Latin Inscriptions fromCaesarea Maritima. 2001.26 pp., 2 figures, 1plate. Volume Eight 2002. 1 R. LERNER, On Speaking in the Language of the Sons of Man. 18 pp. Century 2 J. VAN Ess, 60 Years Afier: Shlomo Pines's Beiträge and Half a of Research on Atomism in Islamic Theology. 2002. 23 pp. Chapter in the 3 P.W. VAN DER HORST, The Myth of JewishCannibalism: A History ofAntisemitism. 2008. 14 pp. Neoplatonic Source 4 C.D'ANCONA, Man's Conjunction with Intellect: A of Western Muslim Philosophy. 2008. 34 pp. Concepts of Divine 5 C. MARKSCHIESs, Compassion: Some Remarks on

and HumanCompassion in Antiquity. 2011. 14 pp. 6 J. HABERMAS, APhilosophy of Dialogue. 2013. 15 pp. New York, Jewish 7 JR. RussELL, On an Armenian Magical Mauscript: Theological Seminary, Ms 10558. 2013. 86 pp. 8 C. GINZBURG, Inner Dialogues: The Jew as Devil's 23 pp.

Volume Nine

Science 1 L.DASTON, Before the Two Cultures: Big

the Nineteenth Century. 2015. 20 pp.

Advocate. 2014.

and Big Humanities in

Big Science and Big Humanities were both born in the nineteenth century. Long before science and humaníties became the "Two Cutures', both undertook similarly vast projects to amass the archives of the future. Two of the most

ambitious of these projects, the Corpus Inscriptionum Lati narum of the classical philologists and the Carte du Ciel of

the astronomers, stretched over decades and continents. Their origins and history show how the sciences of the ar

chives share aims and practices that challenge the current divisions in the classification of knowledge. The sciences of the archives are those disciplines among both the hu man and the natural sciences that depend on collections of

data andobjects in order to pursue research in the present and ensure the pOssibility of research in the future. The type specimens enshrined by botanists, the core samples drilled by geologists, the ancient observations still referred to by astronomers, the data banks assembled by geneticists, the

museum collections that hold the corpora cherished by art historians and archaeologists, the case histories published in medical journals, the weather diaries and ships' logs trawled by climate scientists, and of course the libraries and

archives visited by historians - these are the sorts of collec tions that define the sciences of the archives.

the early

twenty-first-century rage for Big Data, we have once again entered an archival epoch in the sciences and humanities.

But we have been there before, and there are perhaps some lessons to be learned from the first age of Big Science and

Big Humanities. Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and Visiting Professor in the

Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her recent publications include Objectivity (with Peter Gali son, 2007) and Histories of Scientific Observation (co-edited

with Elizabeth Lunbeck, 2011), as well as essays on the

history of scientific facts, objectivity, curiosity, probability and attention, which have appeared in various journals and collections.

The lecture was delivered on 21 October 2014.