20190724T133020190724T1530Europe/AmsterdamSelf-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.
Drift 25, Rm. 103History of Science Society 2019meeting@hssonline.org
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.
Benchmarking the Self: François-Marc-Louis Naville and His Moral TablesView Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science01:30 PM - 02:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 11:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 12:00:00 UTC
This paper examines the self-measurement and self-tracking practices of one individual, François-Marc-Antoine Naville, a turn of the eighteenth century Genevan pastor and pedagogical innovator, who extensively used self-measuring instruments to choose a destiny in life and improve his moral character. I situate his practices within emerging regimes of time measurement, ranging from Benjamin Franklin’s tools of moral calculation via Marc-Antoine Jullien’s moral thermometer, to Benthamite systems of moral control. I provide a detailed examination of how Naville used and adapted these tools to his own, strongly religious purposes. My contribution thus sheds lights on how technologies of quantification molded notions of autonomy, personal responsibility and citizenship within an emerging utilitarian context that aimed to regulate, control, and optimize human behavior.
Data Rituals: Measurement of Height and Weight in Baby Books, 1872-1940View Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science02:00 PM - 02:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 12:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 12:30:00 UTC
This paper looks at records of baby height and weight in baby books in the US between 1872 and 1940. Baby books, books in which parents record information about their child, are still a familiar object in households with young children. Baby books, this paper shows, are a unique source in which we can follow practices of measuring and quantification from the doctor’s office and the health departments into the household. Although the use of weight and height records by parents might appear to exemplify institutional biopower manifested through internalised self-monitoring, I argue that keeping a record of baby’s growth in a baby book was, in fact, a ritualised version of measurement. Using both work by historians of science on quantification, and anthropological literature on ritual and selfhood, I argue that this ritual of measuring and recording both symbolised and realised the transformation of the baby from newborn status to child and new personality in the family. With the transfer from medical protocol to family practice in baby books, the recording of height and weight thus took on a radically different meaning.
Responsible Selves: The Popularization of the Calorie, Scientific Expertise, and Citizenship in Early 20th Century USView Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science02:30 PM - 03:00 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 12:30:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 13:00:00 UTC
The paper discusses the history of the food calorie as a case study for the popularization of scientific expertise as an ambivalent process of responsibilization. When chemists introduced the calorie to Americans in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, food and bodies became quantifiable unlike ever before. In the early 20th century, calorie counting became popular as a weight-loss method among the white middle class, suggesting that individuals could and should determine their calorie needs and manage their food intake and body weight accordingly. Drawing on popular expertise and personal accounts of dieters, the talk highlights a core ambivalence of self-tracking. On the one hand, modern possibilities of quantification created the self-responsible, enlightened subject who could be his/her own expert. In contrast to earlier forms of weight-loss dieting, calorie counting promised to grant individuals the liberty to choose their foods themselves and to diet on their own authority. On the other hand, the “avalanche of numbers” (Hacking) emerging from modern sciences since the nineteenth century was a crucial part of a biopolitical governmentality subjecting bodies to a new, scientifically authorized, regime of truth. By suggesting that body shape was precisely manageable through calorie counting, the calorie located the responsibility for health and weight within the individual and contributed to creating powerful norms of proper eating and body shape. In times when taking care of one’s body became a litmus test for citizenship, the calorie shaped who was acknowledged as a responsible member of society.
Guidance Counseling in the Midcentury United States: Measurement, Grouping, and the Making of the Intelligent SelfView Abstract Organized SessionThematic Approaches to the Study of Science03:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Europe/Amsterdam) 2019/07/24 13:00:00 UTC - 2019/07/24 13:30:00 UTC
This article takes up National Defense Education Act (NDEA) and NDEA-related calls in the late 1950s for the training of an emergent profession—the guidance counselor—which was to play an instrumental role in public schools in both the measuring and placement of students in schools by “intelligence” or academic “ability.” My analysis will show that, according to its advocates, guidance counseling would not only inform the self-understanding of the measured individual, but it would also work to condition the ideology of individual “intelligence” across numerous layers of social life around the student: through peer group, through teachers and school administrators, and finally through home, family and wider community. But these policy arguments related to testing and counseling were occurring not just in the wake of the NDEA, but also in the very recent context of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the far-reaching Supreme Court mandate to desegregate public schools. Thus, I argue that a large portion of nation-wide unease among whites about desegregation—which was perceived at root as a problem of contact and grouping—was translated, at least in part, into calls for increased and more systematic grouping of another kind, now by individual “ability” or “intelligence.” This shift in grouping would occur within an integrating yet also a rapidly stratifying public school curriculum. I have begun this argument elsewhere, and further develop it here by demonstrating the role guidance counseling was supposed to play in this process.
