serendipityoucity

What! Getting inspired by the history & philosophy of science, mathematics, & statistics!

Not in my wildest dreams would I have thought this was to be my fate! But alas here I am digging up papers and books on the issue and can’t wait to get out the pillows, a blanket, get on the sofa with a pot of tea on a Friday night to read these juicy academic accounts of numbers, methods, models, categorization and the unique arrangement of scientific factoids shaping and being shaped by us!

Yesterday I attended a great lecture by David N. Livingstone : Cultural Politics and the Racial Cartographics of Human Origins, where he discussed his investigation of expressions of genetic narratives and how their resulting mappings are culturally appropriated, made real and considered ‘objective’ science.  In his lecture he made reference to Theodore Porter’s work on the history of statistics.  I did some digging and can’t wait to get my hands on The Rise of Statistical Thinking & Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life - sounds like wonderful socio-technological imaginings stuff.  And as previously mentioned elsewhere my discovery of Ian Hacking’s work, and his paper Making Up People which discusses the power of statistical categorization and how socially constructed nomilazations are made ‘real’ and make ‘real’.  Making ‘real’ is important, since once the category exists, as Livingstone pointed out in his lecture yesterday, a community emerges.  He made reference to the discovery that there are quite a few 25 year old gentleman who marry 75 year old women!  Where is the movie I wonder? We normally only ever see the older (usually unfit fellows!) with young babes in films. But I digress!  Benedict Anderson, in Imagine Communities also makes clear how the colonialists institutions of Map, Census and Museums in Asia, said something about the subjects they counted, categorized, rendered in images and organized into collections but also say much about what the colonialists were thinking and potentially less about the subjects they were studying - creating - imagining - manufacturing.

This is wonderful stuff, and inspiring as I am embark on the study of the history of Canada’s Census, the mapping of Canada’s territory, the infrastructures associated with these, but more trying to understand how infrastructure, mapping and statistics make us up, how they help us imagine ‘us’, their import in state formation and the absence of citizens in that process, and what does it mean when citizens, the doers of citizenship do not have access to the means to do citizenship - do not get to help with the story telling, questions the stories being told - or what happens when geographic imaginings are only governmental.  I want to understand who gets to count, map, make categories, judge and enact policies that are performed daily and how they got the mandate to do so.

It is also about placing in conceptual space, the pragmatic work I have been diligently doing for quite some time, helping me frame it in a broader context, how I have been implicated in ‘making stuff up’ and not necessarily in a critical way, not in a bad way, but mostly not thinking about the implications of that work, just doing it.