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SUMMARY:Climate in word and image: science and the Austrian idea - Deborah
  Coen (Columbia University)
DTSTART:20170316T153000Z
DTEND:20170316T170000Z
UID:TALK70249@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Marta Halina
DESCRIPTION:One of the most urgent challenges of climate research today is
  that of conceptualizing interactions across scales of space and time. In 
 her book in progress\, Deborah Coen examines how this problem was addresse
 d in the late Habsburg Monarchy\, where scientists developed an unpreceden
 ted conceptual apparatus for tracking the transfer of energy from the mole
 cular scale to the planetary. Her presentation will offer an overview of t
 his project. The central argument is that these innovations arose in part 
 as a solution to a problem of representation\, a problem that engaged Habs
 burg scientists as servants of a supranational state. The problem was to r
 epresent local differences while producing a coherent overview\; that is\,
  to do justice to the vaunted diversity of the Habsburg lands while reinfo
 rcing the impression of unity. This problem was worked out at the interfac
 e between physical and human geography\, and it stimulated technical innov
 ations across a range of media\, from cartography\, to landscape painting\
 , to fiction and poetry\, to mathematical physics\, while also shaping pol
 itical discourse. In this way\, _Climate in Word and Image_ writes the his
 tory of climate science as a history of scaling: the process of mediating 
 between different systems of measurement\, formal and informal\, designed 
 to apply to different slices of the phenomenal world\, in order to arrive 
 at a common standard of proportionality. A focus on scaling emphasizes not
  only the cognitive work of commensuration\, but also the corporeal\, emot
 ional and social effort that goes into recalibrating our sense of the near
  in relation to the far.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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