Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
wider circles of the population. They drew on stores of local knowledge and
the wisdom of oral and written traditions. They also took pains to translate
earthquake effects between humans and instruments, correlating typical
expressions and behaviors with mechanical traces. These moves were em-
phatically antireductive. They sought a comprehensive, multiperspectival
description of the event: total knowledge, in Mach's sense. One might even
say that in pursuing a scientific vernacular, nineteenth-century seismolo-
gists offered something akin to the “language therapy” called for by central
European philosophers like Mach and Wittgenstein. Like Mach, they as-
sumed that science was only of value to the extent that its conclusions could
be
translated
back into the observations of ordinary people.
26
In this way,
nineteenth-century seismology cultivated a scientific vernacular, a language
that mediated between expert analysis and common experience. It was
not that science had “contradicted and corrected” ordinary sensibilities.
27
Rather, the scientific description of the environment merged with the pub-
lic's own perceptions. When scientists announced that “the notion that the
ground is naturally steadfast is an error,”
28
the public was already develop-
ing the capacity to feel that instability. A common language shaped a com-
mon vision: a living earth meant a quaking earth.
As Karl Kraus observed over a century ago, disasters create a knowledge
vacuum. Immediate official information tends to be uncertain and incon-
sistent, and the public quickly grows suspicious of scientific expertise.
29
In
the past few years, Internet tools like Twitter and Google Maps have enabled
citizens to self-organize and produce knowledge to fill that void—tracking
wildfires in California or reporting personal dosimeter readings in Japan.
Scientists in turn are thinking creatively about how to use data like this.
In the early 1990s, the USGS launched a website to collect data on seismic
events in real time. Called Did You Feel It?, the site mimics the question-
naires developed by Swiss scientists in the 1870s. As a former USGS geolo-
gist explains, “Another indicator for the future is that thousands of ordinary
people, just by using the CCI [Community Internet Intensity] system, are
becoming better earthquake observers. As their skill grows, their aware-
ness of earthquake issues also rises. That in turn promises to make each
of them—
each of you
—more effective members of society. And that is one
of the great benefits of this kind of citizen science.” Like the nineteenth-
century science of seismology, Did You Feel It? seeks to “provide an im-
portant human perspective on earthquakes, providing documentation of
the way people behave and respond, and how they perceive risk.” Like
nineteenth-century observing networks, the site is meant to be a “two-way
