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the conflict between the ideals of the documentation movement and
the methods of macroseismology was clear in their very different uses of the
term “monographic.” the monographic method in seismology, as we know,
entailed a comprehensive narrative of a given earthquake, incorporating
geological, sociological, and historical research. the documentation move-
ment, on the other hand, adopted from Wilhelm Ostwald its own “mono-
graphic principle,” denoting the “division, dissection and redistribution of
items of information.”
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in the first instance, seismology's monographic
method embedded physical facts in historical narratives and descriptions
of the physical and human environment. Documentation's monographic
principle, by contrast, sought to cut information free from narrative, from
context, even from language itself.
this effect was vividly illustrated by the scheme for a seismological bib-
liography proposed by the iSA commission. it consisted of no fewer than
165 categories of phenomena. the primary division was based on the
method of registration, whether human senses or instruments, that is,
“macroseism” versus “microseism.” thus “earthquakes per se” were classed
apart from the “microseisms” that corresponded to “distant” quakes.
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Cata-
strophic effects and geophysical parameters were strenuously pried apart.
Such a bibliography represented nothing less than the systematic dis-
mantling of disasters as scientific objects. As one commentator remarked
at the time, the bibliographic problem in seismology was a “very com-
plex question in the present case, a veritable spider's web, in view of the
multiplicity of topics which seismology touches on and the perspectives
from which they may be considered.”
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Applying the monographic princi-
ple of documentation to nineteenth-century seismology was like snipping
the threads of the “spider's web” that represented its holistic approach to
disaster.
the iSA had been created by an internationalist movement preoccupied
with the present—most urgently with averting the threat of war. in the sci-
ences, internationalists focused on cataloging the
present
state of knowledge.
in seismology, they aimed to standardize data and organize it efficiently, in
order to survey the present seismicity and physical constitution of the globe.
to that end, the iSA came up with various schemes to purge felt reports of
their discursive character. they seem not to have realized, however, that
there is a trade-off between making data commensurable across space and
across time.
the sciences responsible for helping humanity plan wisely for the future
have the tasks of reconstructing the earth's past on the basis of existing data,
producing “complete” data on the here and now, and archiving that data
