Abstracts of the History of Science Society 2004 Austin Meeting 18 ...

Jeremy Vetter, University of Pennsylvania (jvetter@sas.upenn.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom VI
Knowledge, Capitalism, and the States:
The Role of State Surveys in the Economic Development of the U.S. Central West, 1890-1920
Surveys are scientific tools of state authority; they enable a territorial domain to be known and governed. But they also reflect the larger
economic forces of a particular time period, such as the state-promoted expansion of capitalist agriculture and mining across the
United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, state geological surveys were established in the new states of the West,
such as Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Sometimes these states also funded natural history surveys of the
plants and animals of their political territories, although less generously. The proponents of state geological and natural history surveys
articulated a direct relationship between scientific surveys and economic development. This paper seeks to understand that relationship
more analytically by examining state-funded surveys established in the Central West between 1890 and 1920 long cast by U.S. historians
as a decisive watershed in the triumph of corporate capitalism and state bureaucracy. By the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century,
scientific experts began to gain a foothold in states which had been bastions of alternative visions of economic development, especially
Populism, in the 1890s. I argue that the main role of surveys in this time period in the West (especially geological surveys) was to
facilitate the expansion of large scale capitalism. In addition to the obvious task of training experts who might have careers in industry,
these surveys also nurtured a common stock of public knowledge and provided credible knowledge to support investment decisions.
Margarete Voehringer, Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science Berlin (voehringer@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Hill Country A
How to Experiment with Instruments, Stones and People –
Nikolai Ladovski’s Psychotechnical Laboratory for Architecture, Moscow 1926
In post-revolutionary Russia, life has become an experiment. The Russian Avantgarde took the new communist society as a quasi-artistic
attempt and followed the formalist idea of “Art as a method” for visualization, trying to free the automated perception of the suppressed
worker by way of artistic alienation in order to produce an “enlightened Proletarian”. But within this experimental set-up, the
Fine Arts were assisted by the life-sciences of the time: psychology, physiology, psychophysics and in the 1920s predominantly, psychotechnics.
All these disciplines can be synchronized in one major vision: to build a new world for the new, revolutionized human being
– which first of all meant to produce new preconditions for visual perception. My paper will introduce the “Psychoanalytical Method”
and the “Psychotechnical Laboratory” of Nikolai Ladovski, an architect at the VChUTEMAS (Higher Artistic-Technical Laboratories)
in Moscow. In order to study the visual perception of architecture via lines, angles, volume and space, Ladovski in 1926 installed a series
of instruments in a room painted completely black, the so-called “Glasometry” (eye-meter). The reports on his experiments carried the
measurement factors “attention”, “memory”, “perception measurements” and “spatial and motorical abilities” - thus physiological as
well as psychological criteria. I will compare Ladovski’s experiments on human perception to contemporary experimental practices and
thereby contextualize them with the Russian Avantgarde and with the Applied Sciences. In doing so, I question anew both the objects
and agents of the arts and sciences in Soviet Russia and the density of their disciplinary borders. The complicity of psychotechnics with
the arts will shed a new light on the latter’s function as a means for communication beyond language – in Ladovski’s case via space.
Amber Vogel, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (ottotwo@email.unc.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 9:00 - 11:45 AM - Big Bend D & E
From Frankenstein to Frankenfoods: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Secondary Education in the Biosciences
This paper will describe “DNA Narratives,” an interdisciplinary curriculum that has been successfully piloted in secondary schools in
North Carolina by the Partnership for Minority Advancement in the Biomolecular Sciences (with funding from the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute and the National Institutes of Health). This curriculum emphasizes the narrative threads in biology the stories and histories
that pique interest, expand vocabulary, supply analogy, and imprint knowledge. In a time of increasing demands on teachers and
students to prepare for state- and nationally mandated tests, these narratives can help them weave useful, reinforcing connections among
biology, language and visual arts, and social studies. Modules in the “DNA Narratives” curriculum are informed by the interdisciplinary
approaches of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experimenters and explorers and their literary counterparts. This paper will focus on
three modules: “Frankenstein’s Fingerprints,” “The Evolution of Evolution,” and “Exploring New Environments.” These modules dealing
with genetics, evolution, and ecosystems, respectively draw on the lives and works of figures like Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin,
Mary Shelley, and William Blake to provide historical contexts and literary frameworks for what are sometimes challenging topics on the
pre-college biology syllabus. In combination with a range of innovative pedagogical techniques, this approach helps teachers and students
across disciplines make connections among spheres of knowledge, as well as between past and present advances in scientific
understanding.
Adelheid Voskuhl, Cornell University (acv3@cornell.edu)
Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM - Texas Ballroom VII