Jean Vogt 1929–2005: His Life as a Seismologist, Geologist, Geographer, and Historian - Historical Seismology: Interdisciplinary Studies of Past and Recent Earthquakes - page 11

7 Jean Vogt's Legacy

7.1 Historical Seismology: Definition and Methodology

From the early 80s, Vogt published some short papers on methodology (Vogt 1981,
1987; Vogt et al. 1985), and because of his expertise, he was among the authors of
the milestone paper “Notes on historical seismicity” (Ambraseys et al. 1983).
We owe him the current definition of “Historical Seismology” (Vogt (1991,
1993), but he used this wording in the 1988 draft of this paper submitted as a report
to the EC Project RHISE) for the newly-born discipline dealing with earthquakes
of the past by means of an interdisciplinary scientific approach, agreed and imple-
mented by historians and seismologists, “together”. That this scientific relationship
had many problematic aspects, was definitely apparent to him, who wrote in his
“Historical Seismology. Some notes on sources for seismologists” (Vogt 1993):
“ While seismologists desperately need historians' help, they should correct some
historians' excesses [when they concern themselves with disastrous earthquakes
only]. On the other hand, seismologists are often frightened by seemingly irrational
complex problems of tracing sources in a mosaic of depositories ”.
Jean Vogt liked to quote his methodological papers both in public meetings and
informal talks, and in his own wake, we are quoting them here and there to illus-
trate his perspective. In his search for sources, he regularly started from referring
to what he called “Investigation tools”, which, he said, helped to make his research
“less frightful”, and which consisted in an “arsenal of working tools at all scales,
with useful overlappings” (Vogt 1993). He was thus recognizing the importance
of library indexes and catalogues by subject, as well as of archival inventories, all
those being the auxiliary tools well known to historians, and to him through the
never abandoned parallel investigation of agrarian history. What Jean knew was that
these tools were not known to and among seismologists, to whom this message was
sent: “ After long preliminaries, how should proper research work be undertaken?
[ ] Actually most of new knowledge

comes from casual mentions, often limited to some words [

... ] straightforward work is often impossible [ ...

]” (Vogt 1993).
This was Jean Vogt's approach, a combination of a deep knowledge of geopoli-
tics and an enormous amount of serendipity. He was systematically turning piles of
documents in libraries and archives, digging up plenty of records, and then minutely
cross-checking his findings.
He was deeply concerned with all the aspects related to the interpretation of
historical earthquake records in seismological terms. From his “two decades” of
experience, “although as an outsider” as he defined himself, stems the nearly “epis-
temological” paper “The weight of pseudo-objectivity” (Vogt 1996). As usual, after
proposing a series of case histories, he offers his solution: “ To avoid the pitfalls
of pseudo-objectivity, a quickly growing danger thanks to hasty and irrational
computer-work, a kind of constructive subjectivity is needed, in a seemingly para-
doxical way, with an ability to master complex problems in a critical and interdis-
ciplinary way, a modest approach towards more objectivity, not incompatible at all
with the French expression of libre arbitre” (Vogt 1996).

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