Knowledge Discovery and the Aesthetics of Big Data: Simulating the Herschel Observatory

Abstract

A Rice University undergraduate astrophysics student, Adolfo Carvalho, worked with a humanities researcher, John Mulligan, in the summer of 2018 to develop a framework for simulating what the Romantic astronomer William Herschel would have seen during nearly any of his observational runs. This simulation serves the historical purpose of bringing to life archival data that was produced by the Herschel siblings William and Caroline, who are credited with having invented the modern science of cosmology. From a media studies perspective, the use of intensive computational resources to produce boring, accurate, real-time simulations of William Herschel’s observations helps us to confront our default mode of conflating visual complexity with reality in the era of big data. At the intersection of data science, the history of science, and media studies, the project proposes the aesthetics of boredom as a means of dwelling with the sense of big data as “big” relative to modes of knowledge production.