Everyday Life and the Birth of Mass Observation

2014

Theory of Science, XXXV/4, 2013, pp. 551-555

Leonardo, 2011

Outlining and reflecting upon a new research agenda on participatory mass observation and citizen science as an introduction to the 3 project outlines in this special section of Transactions.

Science Museum Group Journal, 2023

Like the contributions to the other papers in this collection (‘Object itineraries’ and ‘Instrumental networks’), those in this final section explore instrumental networks and object itineraries in order to tell new histories of observatory sites and their associated networks. (For a discussion of the genesis and thinking behind the collection of papers see the ‘Introduction’). Here, however, they focus on object stories that highlight the opportunities for and importance of communicating with those outside the scientific community. They show, however, a wide range of potential and actual audiences to be mediated between, from closely associated scientific institutions and those holding the purse strings within government, to groups making up the local civic society and a wider and more diffuse audience for scientific outputs and achievements. The objects explored here are an 1850s model of electrically triggered time signals, associated with those at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh; a late nineteenth-century astrographic telescope that, with approval of scientific and governmental audiences, brought the National Astronomical Observatory of Mexico into an international project and subsequently found new audiences through public display and artistic intervention; and a photoelectric relay that advertised the Yerkes Observatory to the Chicago and visiting public by forming part of a stunt, whereby the light of a distant star triggered the lighting of the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition.

The Cambridge Companion to Folk Music, edited by Ross Cole, estimated 2025, 2025

Euro-American intellectuals began by thinking of folklore as relics from a pre-modern era, showing our own nostalgic anti-modernism. Paradoxically, we then subjected folklore to the information control mechanisms of modernity: identification, observation, investigation, collection, classification, analysis, comparison, interpretation, and evaluation-all in service to science, expertise, universities, and the knowledge production industry. Today, we challenge the inscription of folklore studies into the epistemology of modernity and its institutional power structures, especially in terms of its consequences for minorities and people of color. In this essay I construct a brief history of folksong observation and collecting chiefly in the United States, the region I know best. I attend to how and why the consensus among American folklorists changed over time concerning who are the folk (if not peasants, then who?), what constitutes folksong, and how folksong is to be studied and understood. [Written in 2023; at the proof stage as of July, 2025; awaiting publication later in 2025.]

Anthropological Quarterly, 2012

Focusing ethnographically on astronomers engaged in “look back studies” of cosmic evolution, this essay considers how they make telescopic observations at an optical observatory in the context of their epistemic work at other sites. Foucault’s notion of a heterotopia captures key aspects of how the observatory is set apart from astronomers’ work with digital data elsewhere. However, visual practices of interpreting telescopic exposures in the observatory’s control room do reach across this divide and inform later epistemic work, such as when scientists use these exposures retrospectively as windows into the functioning of telescopes and detectors. Visiting astronomers remark that witnessing the emergence of exposures in the control room asserts to them the reality of the cosmic objects they study. I interpret this as being grounded in their understanding of semiosis.

Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 1998

Mass-Observation: Text, Context and Analysis of the Pioneering Pamphlet and Movement, 2023

The republication of the original Mass-Observation pamphlet from 1937 is an opportunity to consider Mass-Observation (henceforth MO) not as a historical institution that was particularly active in the 1930s and 40s, nor as a sociological practice from the mid-century that was then picked up again in the 1980s, but as an emergent project.