Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
for future generations. As geoff Bowker argues, the problem with comput-
erized data in the environmental sciences is often that it includes too little
of the context in which it was produced.
80
Without information about the
physical, scientific, and social milieus in which it was generated, data loses
much of its value to future researchers. Lack of context is evident in many
ways. Sometimes it's a matter of language, as when a climate model exists
only in an outdated code, or when weather has been described in the lost
vocabulary of seafaring (how did a “moderate gale” differ from a wind that
“blows hard”?). in this vein, seismologists have developed “lexicons” of
the words typically used in other eras to describe earthquakes and tsuna-
mis.
81
Sometimes, the problem is an incompletely recorded measurement
process—likely something so basic to the scientist's training and everyday
work that she would never think to write it down. Sometimes it's a result of
theory change: seemingly unrelated phenomena might one day be judged
essential to the process she is recording. indeed, the relevant information
goes beyond facts and protocols to include values, or what historian Chris-
tian Rohr calls “mentalities.” in order to date floods of the Danube in the
sixteenth century, Rohr argues, one needs to know that most floods were
not perceived as disasters at all. they were normal, seasonal events, which
were manageable within a system of warning and prevention. For that rea-
son, they do not appear where a climatologist would look for them today,
namely, in historical annals. Rohr underscores that environmental data
is deeply embedded in historical cultures of perceiving, interpreting, and
managing nature.
82
geoscientists look to the past and to the future. in order to interpret
records of the earth's history, they need knowledge of the human past. in or-
der to serve future generations, they need to index their data with elements
of the present—the world they take for granted. these tasks require a sense
for historical otherness. Like nineteenth-century seismology, they require a
feeling for history, both human and natural.
Conclusion
the iSA collapsed during the great War, and with it the hope of constructing
an integrated international approach to seismic risk. Until the late 1960s,
the human dimensions of earthquakes were studied, if at all, within the
national frameworks of hazards geography and Cold War disaster sociol-
ogy. international seismology endured as an observatory science, a science
of insensible vibrations. Under the international Union for geodesy and
geophysics (founded in 1919, the year of gerland's death), the Strasbourg
