Self-Tracking, Self-Making, and the History of Science

Today people increasingly use digital technologies to collect data about their body functions and everyday habits. They measure aspects such as sleep patterns, physical performance and calorie intake as well as mood and productivity, in pursuit of self-knowledge and self-improvement. This rapidly growing popular interest in self-tracking has been hailed by journalists and sociologists as a revolutionary development. Historians know better: there are all sorts of self-measuring tools and ideals for self-improvement that go back to the nineteenth century if not further. Quantification tools such as weighing scales, thermometers and accounting tables were produced in scientific circles, but also gained a more popular usage that we want to trace in this panel. The papers in this panel all discuss aspects of science-inspired self-tracking and self-making in the last two centuries. They bring two strands of interest in the history of science together: first the question how the use of numbers became more widespread in science and society in the modern, statistical age and second the history of scientific self-fashioning. We look at how individuals in the western world became interested in their own measurements, and at how scientific professionals and the state suggested that they should. We explore how ideas about self-tracking were bound up with new notions of autonomy, responsibility, citizenship and self-improvement and we argue that self-fashioning through measurements was one of the ways in which scientific technologies had an impact on individual lives and selves. The panel thus highlights the genealogy of our increasingly metric life today.