Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record
- Submitting institution
-
De Montfort University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32050
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
10.7208/chicago/9780226129259.001.0001
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- ISBN
- 9780226129112
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Documenting the World is about the material and social lives of photographs and films made in the quest by science to document the world as we know it. The edited volume results from a working group project of the same name supported by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Department III (MPIWG) run collaboratively by Professor Gregg Mitman (University of Wisconsin, Madison) and Professor Kelley Wilder (De Montfort University). Between 2010 and 2015, 11 scholars from the USA, Germany and the UK met in a conference (2008, Berlin) and a workshop (2010, Berlin) to discuss the role of photographs that act as data in the archives of science. The interdisciplinary nature of the enquiry took in both moving image and still photography across geography, anthropology, archaeology, space science and archive science, and questioned the very nature of how photographic archives gain evidentiary power, and how scientific disciplines infused photographic archives with the impulse to document. As one of several working groups in a programme of research into the Sciences of the Archives (2010-2019), led by Lorraine Daston at the MPIWG, our research also took in corresponding concerns about the practices of rationality especially considering the documentary impulse that emerged in the late nineteenth century. The findings of this intensive collaborative work were twofold: first the evolution of a framework with which to understand the making, collection and re-circulation of scientific photographic archives, and second, chapters that detail how those archives pattern scientific practices. The co-written introduction is free to access, and the book has been extensively reviewed in the history of science, visual culture, and photographic history journals.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -