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Publication Voices of the Dead: James Neel's Amerindian Studies(2003-01-01) Lindee, Susan MDuring his 1967 fieldwork, James V. Neel, professor of human genetics at the University of Michigan, spent a good deal of time collecting chicken dung. He scraped up dirt and chicken waste from the ground around the Yanomamö villages. He sought out dirt from the floors of the Yanomamö houses, where parrots were kept as free-roaming pets. He crawled under chicken coops, filling seventy-five labeled plastic bags with samples, using a fresh plastic spoon for each sample, and he worried about getting this soil and bird waste safely back to Atlanta, Georgia, for testing at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).1Publication The American Career of Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry, 1806-1853(1991-03-01) Lindee, Susan MJane Haldimand Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry has traditionally claimed historical attention for its effects on the young bookbinder Michael Faraday, who was converted to a life of science while binding and reading it. Marcet "inspired Faraday with a love of science and blazed for him that road in chemical and physical experimentation which led to such marvelous results," in H.J. Mozans's romantic account. Or, as Eva Armstrong put it, Marcet led Faraday to "dedicate himself to a science in which his name became immortal."1Publication Introduction: Audio/Visual(2011-05-26) Mills, Mara; Tresch, John“A/V” seems to belong to the always-already obsolete. Even at the height of the craze for “audiovisual aids” in the mid-twentieth century, its association with the humble schoolroom and the “A/V geek” gave the acronym an air of the outmoded. Overtaken, in quick succession, by “multimedia” and “new media” at the end of the century, the audiovisual seems all the more rudimentary, remedial rather than remediated, or simply a minor component of larger media systems.Publication La « Technesthétique » : Répétition, Habitude et Dispositif Technique Dans Les Arts Romantiques(2010-01-01) Tresch, JohnFrançais En 1843, le physicien André-Marie Ampère décrit une nouvelle science, la « technesthétique », qui porte sur les « moyens par lesquels l’homme agit sur l’intelligence ou la volonté des autres hommes ». Cette nouvelle science correspond à la recherche des artistes romantiques pour des nouveaux effets et à leur fascination pour la puissance transformatrice de l’industrie. Comme une traduction théorique de ces obsessions, les lecteurs « mineurs » du philosophe Maine de Biran – y compris Ampère, Alexandre Bertrand, Moreau du Tours et Félix Ravaisson – ont avancé des analyses des interactions dynamiques entre le mouvement et la pensée, la matière et l’esprit. Leur intérêt pour les modifications des perceptions par l’habitude, par la répétition et par la technique entrecroise et éclaircit la « technesthétique » des arts romantiques. English In 1843 the physicist André-Marie Ampère announced a new science, "Techno-aesthetics", which dealt with "the means by which man acts on the intelligence or the will of other men." This new science corresponds with romantic artists’ search for new, striking effects and their fascination with the transformative power of industry. A theoretical mirror for these obsessions can be found in the works of the "minor" readers of the philosopher Maine de Biran – a group that includes Ampère, Alexandre Bertrand, Moreau de Tours and Félix Ravaisson – who advanced subtle analyses of the dynamic interactions between movement and thought, between matter and mind. Their interest in the modifications brought to perception by habit, by repetition and by technology intersects and illuminates the "technaesthetics" of the romantic arts.Publication The Prophet and the Pendulum: Sensational Science and Audiovisual Phantasmagoria Around 1848(2011-05-26) Tresch, JohnDuring the French Second Republic—the volatile period between the 1848 Revolution and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état—two striking performances fired the imaginations of Parisian audiences. The first, in 1849, was a return: after more than a decade, the master of the Parisian grand opera, Giacomo Meyerbeer, launched Le prophète, whose complex instrumentation and astounding visuals—including the unprecedented use of electric lighting—surpassed even his own previous innovations in sound and vision. The second, in 1851, was a debut: the installation of Foucault’s pendulum in the Panthéon. The installation marked the first public exposure of one of the most celebrated demonstrations in the history of science. A heavy copper ball suspended from the former cathedral’s copula, once set in motion, swung in a plane that slowly traced a circle on the marble floor, demonstrating the rotation of the earth.Publication Publication A Centrifuge of Calculation: Managing Data and Enthusiasm in Early Twentieth-Century Bird Banding(2017-01-01) Benson, Etienne SBeginning in 1920, bird banding in the United States was coordinated by an office within the U.S. Biological Survey that recruited volunteers, issued permits, distributed bands and reporting forms, and collected and organized the data that resulted. In the 1920s and 1930s, data from thousands of volunteers banding millions of birds helped ornithologists map migratory flyaways and census bird populations on a continental scale. This essay argues that the success of the bird-banding program depended on a fragile balance between the centripetal effects of national coordination and the centrifugal effects of volunteer enthusiasm. For various reasons, efforts to maintain this balance were largely abandoned by the Bird-Banding Office from the late 1930s onward. Nevertheless, the first two decades of the national bird-banding effort provide an example of how a "citizen-science" project that generates "Big Data" can produce significant scientific results without subordinating the enthusiasms of volunteers to the data-collecting needs of professional scientists.Publication Introduction(2017-01-01) Benson, Etienne S; Braun, Veit; Langford, Jean M; Münster, Daniel; Münster, Ursula; Schmitt, SusanneSpecies categories are not simply an invention of the human mind. Plants, animals, fungi, and viruses engage in "species making" by mingling and separating.1 Yet, at the same time, the boundaries that define or differentiate species are not simply "natural"; they are actively made, maintained, politically charged, and fashioned to serve some needs more than others, inviting new essentialisms even as they alert us to important differences. Like other rubrics for organizing social worlds—race, ethnicity, gender, age, ability—the concept of species and the alternative classifications it invites are complicated and controversial. Whether wild or domestic, pet or pest, such categories are subject to temporally fluctuating human motives, shifting values, and cultural diversities.Publication Generating Infrastructural Invisibility: Insulation, Interconnection, and Avian Excrement in the Southern California Power Grid(2015-05-01) Benson, Etienne SThe fact that industrial infrastructures are embedded in complex environments animated by unexpected agencies is often invisible to their users—at least those who live in rich, industrialized societies with reliable systems for distributing water, power, and other goods and services. This article investigates how that invisibility is generated through a case study of electric power transmission in California in the early twentieth century. In the 1910s, the Pacific Light and Power Company constructed a 150,000-volt transmission line that delivered power from the Big Creek hydroelectric complex in the Sierra Nevada to customers in Los Angeles, more than 240 miles (386 kilometers) away. When the Southern California Edison Company upgraded this line to 220,000 volts in the early 1920s, the rate of disruptive "flashovers" on the line jumped dramatically. After months of investigation, the cause was determined to be excrement from birds perching on the transmission towers. To render this and other sources of interruption invisible to users, two techniques were used: insulation and interconnection. These kinds of humble techniques of separation and resilience are ubiquitous in modern infrastructure. By creating and maintaining divisions, they make it possible for new kinds of agency to emerge. Infrastructures become animate: responsive to their environments in ways that allow them to persist in the face of continual change.Publication Review of Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the making of a Computational Planet(2017-03-01) Benson, Etienne SThe focus of Jennifer Gabrys's Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet is "the becoming environmental of computation" (p. 4) understood as the growth of "a distributed and embedded range of monitoring technologies that inform how environments are sensed and managed (p. 3). Although based on wide-ranging research carried out over the past decade, it is not a detailed empirical study; instead, it deploys a number of well-chosen examples in pursuit of more abstract ends.