Available at https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01832
Abstract: A Rice University undergraduate astrophysics student, Adolfo Carvalho, worked with a humanities researcher, John Mulligan, in the summer of 2018 to develop a framework for simulating what the Romantic astronomer William Herschel would have seen during nearly any of his observational runs. This simulation serves the historical purpose of bringing to life archival data that was produced by the Herschel siblings William and Caroline, who are credited with having invented the modern science of cosmology. From a media studies perspective, the use of intensive computational resources to produce boring, accurate, real-time simulations of William Herschel’s observations helps us to confront our default mode of conflating visual complexity with reality in the era of big data. At the intersection of data science, the history of science, and media studies, the project proposes the aesthetics of boredom as a means of dwelling with the sense of big data as “big” relative to modes of knowledge production.
My dissertation was not possible before I wrote about Dorothy Wordsworth; and it did not exist in any meaningful sense until I paired the Wordsworths with the Herschels to explore the question of intellectual labor. The argument has kept this dyadic structure since the dissertation. I need the Romantic sciences to talk about some of the things I see in Romantic literature.
In the Wordsworths’ shared writings, I saw visual complexity, and in the Herschels, an obsession with the isolation and production of facts. Every item in the Herschels’ database notes the existence and some facts about an object, with a high degree of accuracy; and it has been said that Caroline Herschel flawlessly calculated her finished dataset (See Hoskin, Discoverers of the Universe). In this sense they are not data but facts: not bad/good but true/false (See Daniel Rosenberg on this distinction).
Still, we can mistake the Herschels as trading in data because they collected so many discrete facts that it’s possible to perform meaningful statistical analyses on them (See Hoskin, Construction of the Heavens). Collecting and processing all those facts required time — which is to say, intellectual labor/computing power. The siblings created communication and processing protocols and spent years of their lives following them: recording observations and crunching numbers.
In the Summer of 2018, I partnered with Adolfo Carvalho, a gifted Master’s student in Rice’s astrophysics department. He programmed for the planetarium software Stellarium a plugin that can simulate what William Herschel saw, second by second, through the eyepiece. What we see is the slow but unrelenting grind of the data-based sciences: painfully boring and incredibly precise. Perhaps the Wordsworths are on the other side of boredom — the domestic sublime — “Poor Coleridge!”
The interactive piece will be installed in the astrophysics department. The Twitter feed catalogues:
- The date of each observing session, and the band of sky it targeted.
- The supporting archival notes that we used to reconstruct the sweep.
- The video simulation of the observation run.
Future work: I have a loose design for an interactive, multi-player simulation that allows a team to participate in the Herschel observatory’s operations, and scores user actions against the historical record. But these videos will have to entertain us in the meantime 🙂