[Sci-tech-public] STS Circle, December 3 - Rebecca Lemov (Please RSVP)

[STS]

STS Circle at Harvard
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Rebecca Lemov
Harvard, History of Science

on
The Fantasy of Total Information: A Brief History of the Microcard

Monday, December 3
12:15-2:00 p.m.
Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford Street, Room 100F

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Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu>@hks.harvard.edu<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu> by 5pm Wednesday, November 28.

Abstract: “A future five-foot shelf,” a writer for Time magazine observed in 1944 of an emerging information-storage technology called the microcard, “may be no bulkier than a pack of playing cards.” From aviary communication experiments during the Franco Prussian war to the Belgian knowledge-proscenium, the Mundaneum, to FDR's wartime archives of U.S. patrimonial documentation, the microform (of which the microcard was an outgrowth) was a burgeoning technology that formed the leading edge of hopes to contain and manage an amount of information judged to be potentially “total.” Originating in mid-nineteenth century microphotographs, microform technology spread episodically. By the early to mid-twentieth century, archiving the “total human record” became the goal a range of mid-century-modern social scientists shared and, in pursuing it, they targeted ever-more elusive elements of the human experience. Meanwhile, a visionary librarian from Connecticut, Fremont Rider, invented the particular form of the microcard, on which was stored beginning in 1956, among other things, a project archiving dreams and the elements of the subjective life.  What sort of theory of technology can make sense of the microcard? What are the politics of this failed information technology?


Biography: Rebecca Lemov is an associate professor in the department of the History of Science at Harvard. Her research focuses on key episodes and experiments in the history of the human and behavioral sciences. Her current work, “Database of Dreams: Social Science's Forgotten Archive of How to Be Human, 1942-1965,” examines attempts to map the subjective parts of the human psyche via once-futuristic data-storage techniques. She teaches courses on brainwashing and the history of coercive interrogation, as well as the history of the social sciences more broadly. Her first book, World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes and Men (Farrar Strauss Giroux/Hill and Wang, 2005) chronicled behavioral scientists’ attempts to engineer human society and people’s responses.


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