Sciences of the Archives explained by Lorraine Daston
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00:00
Meeting/Interview
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
I'm interested in the preconditions for science that lasts over thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of years. We know that civilizations have a lifetime perhaps on the outside of a thousand years and yet sciences like astronomy demand a time scale, especially a time scale of observation that ten thousand years, even better for geology, hundreds of thousands of years,
00:26
a million years. The question we set out to answer was what makes this kind of longue duret science possible and what could possibly motivate people over not just generations, not just over centuries,
00:48
but over millennia to see themselves as part of this superhuman endeavor that makes possible the study of phenomena like the stars, the formation of the earth, the fluctuations of human population,
01:07
the development of the world climate. The question is what are the preconditions in terms of keeping data, having archives of data that make that kind of science possible so that we can have a science of phenomena that dwarf a human lifespan of perhaps 75 years. You might think
01:29
of science developing on three time scales. It will start with the fastest time scale. This is allegretto if you think of it in musical terms. Every week the major scientific journals
01:42
Science, Nature, Cell announce a new empirical discovery often trumpeted with a picture on their front page. That's a tempo which is unfolding at the level of weeks and months. On a somewhat slower time scale, a time scale of decades or centuries, there are the major
02:04
theoretical frameworks which provide a context for explaining and developing those empirical discoveries. We might think of them as associated with great names in the history of physics, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, in the history of biology, Charles Darwin, Watson and Crick.
02:25
The third level is that level of the longest time period. Those are the time periods which are required in order to have a study of the stars, the formation of the Earth, major trends
02:43
in human demography, human population, evolution or the world's climate. And that's what I'm interested in. How is that possible given how short our lifetimes are, how short even most civilizations are? The method that we use to investigate this really vast question, not only
03:06
in terms of its dimensions but also its implications, is to first of all do something which is rather unusual in the humanities, in historical research, which is to create a group of scholars together. No one scholar can cover the history of a field as long-lived as astronomy
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from its origins in Mesopotamia 3,000, 4,000 years ago to the present. We form a working group. In this case we were interested in those sciences which we call the sciences of the archives
03:42
which depend on these long-lived collections. Each of us had a topic, astronomy, archaeology, geology, climatology, demography, and we not only looked at the historical sources
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which each of us knew from his or her specialty, we held intensive discussions in order to see whether or not there were certain patterns to how the sciences in different times and places
04:21
organized themselves to meet this challenge of keeping an archive that would long outlive not only individuals, not only organizations like universities, not even nations or civilizations but would be perhaps as old as humanity. A lot of that has to do with studying not only
04:47
the content of the data that's kept but also the materials. In Mesopotamia we're often talking about clay tablets. In the present we're talking about a much less durable material. The clay tablets
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which contain cuneiform observations have lasted for millennia and they're still, these observations are still being used by NASA in their five millennium canon of lunar and solar eclipses. But we're also talking about a much more ephemeral medium, the CD which has a physical lifetime of 30 years. So that entire span is important to us. What's also important to us
05:28
is to study the institutional organization of the repositories of these records given that the civilizations that create them will eventually decline and disappear.
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How is it that these records have been cherished, copied, transmitted over millennia and also over continents? What kinds of routes of cultural transmission are necessary in order to make that possible? So this is the a mosaic where the pieces have to be put together
06:06
by a team of scholars. Our findings were that first and foremost those who are involved have to have an almost utopian vision of their disciplinary future. This is why it is not an
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accident that there is so much utopian writing in connection with science and science fiction from the very beginning. It's because these sciences demand that they imagine that the
06:44
discipline will continue and make use of the archives which they have so carefully stored up a thousand years, two thousand, even three thousand years into the future. The next result is it's important to have the ability to organize, often to organize on an international scale
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which has no equivalent in any other era of human endeavor. What certain sciences have managed of the 19th century was the heyday of this kind of organization is an international project
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which commits its members over decades and sometimes even the length of a century to the effort of creating these archives. Governments have not managed this, even
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explicitly international governmental efforts, most recently the World Climate Conference, have not managed this. Those who commit themselves cannot foresee what developments, what alluring possible research avenues might open up after they have begun the work of
08:02
contributing to the archives and yet they must remain steadfast until the project is done. The third is connected to that unpredictability of research and that is what motivates people to put aside their individualistic motivations, what we would call the egoistic disciplinary
08:26
motivations of trailblazing in a completely new area of research or making a name individually through a discovery is the sense that scientific progress is open-ended. By the middle of the
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19th century scientists were no longer so convinced that there was any stable part of science and by 1900 they were resigned to the melancholy truth that what scientific progress meant was that at any moment any scientific achievement might be dethroned by another,
09:06
most spectacularly in the case of special and general relativity in the first two decades of the 20th century quantum mechanics but also genetics. The great German sociologist Max Weber
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once wrote in his essay Science as a Vocation, every scientist must resign himself to the truth that whatever has been achieved will in 10, 20, 50 years be surpassed and indeed that is the hope of science. Under those circumstances though every scientist must ask herself or himself
09:43
what will endure from all that I have done and the answer in the latter part of the 19th century which as I said was the point at which these archival projects reached their zenith was the archives will endure. Regardless of how unpredictable the future research programs
10:03
of our sciences will be they will be grateful to have these archives. We might imagine the findings and their relevance as a series of concentric circles and the first circle
10:21
involves the science itself and that is that although these are not the most glamorous projects archival projects and also they demand great resources of time, intelligence and money
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they are nonetheless worthwhile investments indeed essential investments for the future of scientific research. The second is a result which is more about two kinds of motivation in science. One motivation very familiar to us which is
11:07
the individualistic motivation the driving curiosity to find out something to solve a problem and also for one's name and glory to be associated with the solution of the problem
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that's a perfectly respectable and indeed necessary motivation but there's another kind of motivation which is loyalty and dedication to this long-term research program of the sciences which also sometimes indeed often involves a sacrifice of the individualistic motivation.
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The third level is a vision about what it takes to know which understands the knower not as an individual knower but as a community that spans continents and centuries. It's a utopian vision and the fourth is an existence proof that certain forms of global governance are possible
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in the form of these international projects scientific projects to create and safeguard the archives of the future. In an age when we wonder whether or not global governance
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is possible here we have a modest but nonetheless real and effective example. So where is all of this going? It raises a much larger question about the nature of science
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and its relationship to other forms of knowledge. There is a well-established story about the origins of modern science which locates its birth in 16th 17th century Europe.
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Modern science as we know it places predictive accuracy at the zenith of its pyramid of epistemic goals. This is not the case perhaps for all of the sciences. Evolutionary biology
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might not meet this criterion. Certain of the social sciences would certainly not meet this criterion but those sciences whose achievements we admire the most do meet this criterion. Imagine instead of predictive accuracy we elevated certainty to the highest
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place in that hierarchy. This was in fact the case in medieval Latin Europe. The foremost aspiration for natural philosophy, the study of nature, was certain universal
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knowledge and certainly predictive accuracy wouldn't have been squirmed but it was low on the totem pole. We might imagine a system, a genuine system of knowledge which valued coherence. All the parts have to fit together. We take specialization to be the necessary
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price for scientific progress but one could imagine and indeed instantiate a knowledge tradition which saw the coherence not only of physics and chemistry but of biology, philology, even philosophy as the highest possible aspiration for knowledge or depth of
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explanation might be another. We have examples now of sciences which are split between a pursuit of deep explanations or a pursuit of predictive accuracy. So in meteorology for example the
15:00
weather forecasts we get every day, they are most accurate if they're done on a statistical basis. Basically the heuristic is the weather of tomorrow will be like the weather of today but that's not a deep explanation and there are meteorologists who are looking at the movement
15:22
of convection currents throughout the atmosphere trying to develop explanatory models. That's a search for explanation as the highest is iteratum. The statistical approach which is agnostic about the causes is a search for a predictive accuracy. There's no reason why these two have to coincide. They can also be divergent paths which require a divergent choice
15:48
of research program. So the next step for this kind of research is to look broadly across several cultures and several epochs to try and get an idea of the possibilities of different
16:03
knowledge systems with their different epistemic aspirations and to learn something about what's really special about what we call modern science.