Time to Eat the Dogs
On Science, History, and ExplorationDigital Archive: Conrad Martens
Conrad Martens
Before I starting working on the frost-bitten, scurvy-riddled, dog-eating world of Arctic explorers, I researched more inviting places, such as Valparaiso Chile, “the Vale of Paradise.” In the 19th century, Valparaiso was a popular port for European and North American voyagers, a place for crew to load up on provisions, repair hullwork, mend sails, and dive into debauchery before the long sail across the Pacific. The U.S Exploring Expedition stopped here, as did the U.S. Astronomical Expedition, and even HMS Beagle, disembarcking a sprightly young, recently-graduated Charles Darwin into town for some quick surveys of the Cordilleras before heading out into the Pacific (oh, with a minor stop at the Galapagos on the way). My masters thesis “Describing the Vale of Paradise: Valparaiso Chile in the Years after Humboldt” looked at the way these various scientific expeditions talked about Valparaiso, and more importantly, how they rendered it in images.
Eglise de San Francisco, Valparaiso Chile, Conrad Martens, 1834
Darwin did not leave much in the way of illustrations of the town, but the Beagle’s draughtsman, Conrad Martens did. Martens’ landscapes are quiet, almost languid, places, a world apart from the pulse-pounding wind-swept, volcano-erupting landscapes of his fellow Romantics. As I sat in the stacks of the Wisconsin Historical Society looking at these far away places, they gave me a feeling of Darwin’s world…an imperfect impression to be sure, but a feeling nevertheless. Thanks again to the Beagle Project Blog, great conduit of all things Darwin, I have learned that Martens work is now available for all to see at the Cambridge University Library’s website. They have scanned two of the four extant Martens sketchbooks made from the voyage. They include, be still my heart, lovely Valparaiso.
View of Valparaiso from the Bluffs, Conrad Martens, 1834
Digital Archive: AfricaBib
Mary Kingsley, African explorer, ca 1890
For me, graduate school was a happy time, of long days in the archives and long afternoons in the Ratskeller. To be fair though there were also moments of fear: fear of discovering some document that would blow apart my thesis like a howitzer shell. Or worse, fear of finding some book that supported my thesis, indeed supported it so closely that it would render my project superfluous, a poor knock-off of the original. Neither of these happened, though I did have my queasy moments of discovery in the card catalog.
“Der Bücherworm” by Carl Spitzweg, 1850
I calmed my fears by mastering the ways of the database: Historical Abstracts, America: History and Life, the Making of America, Poole’s Periodical Database, Periodical Content Index, Dissertation Abstracts International, the American Periodical Series, etc, etc etc. Database companies market their products as tools for research and networking. And indeed they are. But for the paranoid graduate student, databases are used as radar, informing them when another scholar is flying too close. Happily those days are gone. But I still get a warm, cozy feeling inside when I find a good database. It is researcher’s version of a hot toddy.
Thomas Ewing, Africa, 1830
Such was my feeling last night when I found AfricaBib, a set of three databases about Africa, the most exciting of which is Women Travelers, Explorers, and Missionaries to Africa. The databases are a thirty-year labor of love by research librarian Davis Bullwinkle who started working on the project in 1974, using, no doubt, index cards. As the project grew, Davis began to upgrade to a computer filing system, one designed by the precocious computer-whiz son of a colleague. After Bullwinkle retired in 2008, the database was taken over by the African Studies Centre (ASC) in Leiden, the Netherlands who keep it up to date. The database currently boasts 1800 items. What does this mean in terms of finding material on women explorers? Playing around with the database last night, I entered “Mary Kingsley” into the keyword search. It pulled up 109 records, including published dissertations, scholarly articles, books, and online essays. Very impressive. Nice work Davis.
For more on women travelers and explorers, see my post Women Explorers
2008 Weblog Awards
Time to Eat the Dogs is up for a 2008 Weblog Award under the category “Best Hidden Gem.” I’d appreciate your vote if you feel so moved. The blog appears here at the top of your screen. Click the little green plus sign next to the blog name to register your vote.
Nate Silver, Baseball Analyst, Prophet of the Galactic Empire
Nate Silver
Like most of the free world, I spent October following the U.S. presidential election. For me this meant looking over the dailies, a graph of the national tracking average, and a red/blue map of the Electoral College. This was about the extent of my political forecasting. Not so Nate Silver, statistical boy-genius, baseball analyst, and author of the political projection site FiveThirtyEight.com. Silver’s predictions have caused quite a stir because they have been so prescient. Based on his analysis of polls, he called the election for Obama. . . in March. Call him lucky. Then he predicted 49 of 50 states correctly on election night with a 6.1% margin for Obama, within 0.4 of the actual margin. Silver can add these to a growing list of oracle-like achievements: calling the results the Super Tuesday within 13 delegates (out of 847), predicting the ascendency of the Tampa Bay Rays and the 90-loss season of the Chicago White Sox. Silver now markets a number of statistical models including PECORA, QERA, and SECRET SAUCE (an algorithm for the Big Mac?).
Silver’s uncanny ability to predict things that seem murky to the rest of us reminds me Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, published in 1951-53. Asimov’s story is set in a Galactic Empire which contains thousands of inhabited planets and quadrillions of human beings. The stunning size of this empire allows one man, Hari Seldon, to develop a set of statistical models for predicting the future of civilization, a field of study he calls “psychohistory.” Seldon’s algorithms have no ability to predict the actions of a single individual, any more than one could predict the toss of the coin. The single flip is always unknowable, but not so a hundred flips, a thousand, ten thousand, a series that becomes more predictable with each iteration. It is a science which gains precision as the data aggregates.
Hari Seldon
The story of Silver and Seldon make for good reading. But they also touch upon a very storied debate among historians about the forces that propel history. For centuries, scholars viewed this force (or “agency” as it is called in the Academy) as a power contained within the individual. In other words, one could understand the ebb and flow of empires by following the actions of powerful individuals: popes, kings, and revolutionaries. Certainly this continues to be a popular way of looking at the forces of history, as can be seen by the hefty shelf space afforded “Biography” at Borders and Barnes and Nobles. But among academic historians, the “Great Man” vision of history has lost much of its blush. Individuals continue to matter, but to many of us, the agents of history reside in the realm of the extra-human: institutions, churches, states, and the ephemeries of culture.
Marc Bloch
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the French Annales School of the early 20th century. Its founders, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre grew tired of the emphasis on individuals and big events: wars, coups, congresses, and assassinations. Instead they saw history as a tectonic thing, a gradual unfolding of events caused by millions of people influenced by their habits, geography, and material culture. Here in episodes of “longue durée” lay the true causes for the rise and fall of empires.
So welcome Nate to the world of many parts. We expect big things.
Thank You FHSA
This morning the Forum for the History of Science in America presented me with their 2008 Book Prize for my book The Coldest Crucible. Officer Paul Lucier presented the prize:
On behalf of the membership and officers of the Forum for the History of Science in America, it is my pleasure to announce that the 2008 Forum Prize Committee has unanimously agreed to award this year’s book prize to Michael F. Robinson for The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture, published in 2006 by the University of Chicago….this is a history of science of a very different sort. Instead of focusing on how the explorers collected specimens or tried to map the icy unknown, Robinson explains, in very clear and refreshingly concise fashion, how the Arctic and its explorers tried to collect sponsors and funding, and how they tried to present themselves and their expeditions as relevant to a large public.
My last time in Pittsburgh was in 1998, also at a History of Science meeting. It was the occasion of my first academic paper. I read it, hunched over a podium, to four elderly men in varying states of consciousness. I was tense, the paper was dry, but I don’t think anyone was awake enough to notice. The paper made me wonder why I spent so much time working on these subjects when no one was ever going to read or care about them.
It feels particularly good, then, to receive this award in Pittsburgh (at the same hotel no less). Thank you FHSA! Thanks too to the University of Hartford for their generous write-up.
