Departmental Papers (HSS)
Through a broad range of scholarly projects, HSS faculty research examines relations between the technical practice of scientists, engineers, medical researchers, and clinicians, and the material, social, political and cultural context in which those practices occur.
Search results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 50
Publication Minimal Animal: Surveillance, Simulation, and Stochasticity in Wildlife Biology(2014-01-01) Benson, Etienne SThis article discusses the problematics and potentialities proposed by the "minimal animal" an animal that is nothing but a stochastic pattern across a blank page. The minimal animal was not an invention of the 1960s, but the tracking systems and digital computers that first became available during that period both broadened its reach and changed its character in significant ways.Publication The Urban Upwelling(2015-11-01) Benson, Etienne SIn late September 2015 a video began circulating on social media under the hashtag #pizzarat. As of early October, it had garnered more than seven million views on YouTube—sufficient evidence of cultural relevance to make not only meme-happy sites such as BuzzFeed and Gawker take note, but also mainstream media such as the New York Times, CNN, and NPR. The 14-second video, shot by comedian Matt Little, showed a rat dragging a slice of pizza down the steps of a Manhattan subway station. Responses to the video varied. Some interpreted it as evidence of poor sanitation, while others admired the little rodent's pluck and perseverance, seeing him or her as "a symbol of the ultimate New Yorker."1Publication Sputnik, Cold War Nostalgia, and 9/11: The Lessons of Sputnik post-9/11(2007-10-04) Lindee, Susan MIt is not an anniversary we usually celebrate and it was not any fun for the United States at the time. Fifty years ago today, on the night of October 4, 1957, a 22-inch aluminum ball, primitive by today's standards, sent the American public, and the policy and scientific elite, into high crisis.[1]Publication « La puissante magie de la vraisemblance » : Edgar Allan Poe à l’époque du machinisme(2009-01-01) Tresch, JohnPublication Movement Ecology and the Minimal Animal(2016-01-01) Benson, Etienne SAmong ecologists, movement is on the move. Over the past decade or so, a growing number of researchers have begun to focus their attention on how and why individual animals move across landscapes through time. Research programs come and go, and there is no way of knowing how long this new filed of movement ecology will retain its promise or what new forms it might take. Nonetheless the emergence of this approach to studying animals and landscapes can tell us something about the way scientific practices and conceptions of the animal are changing in an era of Big Data and of growing concerns about the impact of humanity on global ecological processes.1Publication Unbearable Future(2013-01-01) Benson, Etienne S“Two research scientists kill five bears” was the headline splashed across the front page of the Tundra Times on April 8, 1966. The perpetrators were Vagn Flyger and Martin Schein, biologists from Maryland who had just spent three weeks on Alaska’s North Slope trying to tranquilize and tag polar bears. According to Flyger and Schein’s own later report, they had in fact accidentally killed only four bears (Flyger 1967: 53). Of the thirty-eight they had pursued by aircraft over the sea ice near Barrow, Alaska, they had managed to hit seven with darts laden with a powerful muscle relaxant, of which four died of overdoses and two were unaffected. The only specimen of Ursus maritimus they managed to successfully tranquilize, tag and release was killed soon after by an Inuit hunter who complained that the dye the scientists had used had spoiled the skin.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 Toward a New Organology: Instruments of Music and Science(2013-01-01) Tresch, JohnThe Renaissance genre of organological treatises inventoried the forms and functions of musical instruments. This article proposes an update and expansion of the organological tradition, examining the discourses and practices surrounding both musical and scientifi c instruments. Drawing on examples from many periods and genres, we aim to capture instruments’ diverse ways of life. To that end we propose and describe a comparative “ethics of instruments”: an analysis of instruments’ material configurations, social and institutional locations, degrees of freedom, and teleologies. This perspective makes it possible to trace the intersecting and at times divergent histories of science and music: their shared material practices, aesthetic commitments, and attitudes toward technology, as well as their impact on understandings of human agency and the order of nature.Publication 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 Autonomous Biological Sensor Platforms(2011-01-01) Benson, Etienne SLate in 2010, the Journal of Geophysical Research printed a report under the title "Narwhals Document Continued Warming of Southern Baffin Bay."1 The research described by the report was heavily promoted by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which had partially funded it, and the story was picked up by a number of newspapers and blogs, one of which praised the narwhals as "excellent field techs."2 Who were these narwhals? How had they gotten into the business of not merely responding to or communicating among themselves about Arctic climate change but actually documenting it?