Science along the Railroad: Expanding Field Work in the US Central West

Vetter, Jeremy

doi:10.1080/00033790310001592944

Cited by 16 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…The construction of a transcontinental railroad during the late 1860s was another decisive factor in creating the market for American dinosaurs. Along with the telegraph, it linked the supply of fossil bones in the West to the emerging centers of demand in the East (Vetter, 2004). Two men in particular had just begun to earn a nationwide reputation for their interest in prehistoric fossils.…”

Section: The Commodification Of American Dinosaursmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prospecting for dinosaurs on the mining frontier: The value of information in America’s Gilded Age

Rieppel

2015

Soc Stud Sci

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How much is a dinosaur worth? This essay offers an account of the way vertebrate fossils were priced in late 19th-century America to explore the process by which monetary values are established in science. Examining a long and drawn-out negotiation over the sale of an unusually rich dinosaur quarry in Wyoming, I argue that, on their own, abstract market principles did not suffice to mediate between supply and demand. Rather, people haggling over the price of dinosaur bones looked to social norms from the mineral industry for cues on how to value these rare and unusual objects, adopting a set of negotiation tactics that exploited asymmetries in the distribution of scarce information to secure the better end of the deal. On the mining frontier in America's Gilded Age, dinosaurs were thus valued in much the same way as any other scarce natural resource one could dig out of the ground, including gold, silver, and coal.

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Section: The Commodification Of American Dinosaursmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prospecting for dinosaurs on the mining frontier: The value of information in America’s Gilded Age

Rieppel

2015

Soc Stud Sci

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“…Thus, just as many different kinds of scientific field work relied on railroad lines for its westward expansion in the nineteenth century (Vetter 2004), so too did weather observation networks rely on the telegraph lines that usually accompanied the railroads 16 . The telegraph route network constituted the de facto locational realm of possibility for the geographical distribution of daily weather data reporters on the frontier.…”

Section: Kansas City's Weather Network 1905–1915mentioning

confidence: 99%

Lay Observers, Telegraph Lines, and Kansas Weather: The Field Network as a Mode of Knowledge Production

Vetter

2011

Sci Context

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ArgumentThis paper examines the field network – linking together lay observers in geographically distributed locations with a central figure who aggregated their locally produced observations into more general, regional knowledge – as a historically emergent mode of knowledge production. After discussing the significance of weather knowledge as a vital domain in which field networks have operated, it describes and analyzes how a more robust and systematized weather observing field network became established and maintained on the ground in the early twentieth century. This case study, which examines two Kansas City-based local observer networks supervised by the same U.S. Weather Bureau office, demonstrates some of the key issues involved in maintaining field networks, such as the role of communications infrastructure, especially the telegraph, the procedures designed to make local observation more systematic and uniform, and the centralized, hierarchical power relations that underpinned even a low-status example of knowledge production on the periphery.

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“…(From Wallace, The Malay Archipelago [London, 1869].) 5 On the relationship between railroad expansion and scientific field work, see Vetter, 2004. 6 For a general discussion of the special characteristics of science in the field, see Kuklick and Kohler, 1996. Insightful case studies of field science include Pang, 1996;Rozwadowski, 1996;and Schumaker, 1996.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wallace’s Other Line: Human Biogeography and Field Practice in the Eastern Colonial Tropics

Vetter

2006

J Hist Biol

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This paper examines how the 19th-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace used biogeographical mapping practices to draw a boundary line between Malay and Papuan groups in the colonial East Indies in the 1850s. Instead of looking for a continuous gradient of variation between Malays and Papuans, Wallace chose to look for a sharp discontinuity between them. While Wallace's ''human biogeography'' paralleled his similar project to map plant and animal distributions in the same region, he invoked distinctive ''mental and moral'' features as more decisive than physical ones. By following Wallace in the field, we can see his field mapping practices in action -how he conquered the problem of local particularity in the case of human variation. His experiences on the periphery of expanding European empires, far from metropolitan centers, shaped Wallace's observations in the field. Taking his cues from colonial racial categories and his experiences collaborating with local people in the field, Wallace constructed the boundary line between the Malay and Papuan races during several years of work in the field criss-crossing the archipelago as a scientific collector. This effort to map a boundary line in the field was a bold example of using the practices of survey science to raise the status of field work by combining fact gathering with higher-level generalizing, although the response back in the metropole was less than enthusiastic. Upon his return to Britain in the 1860s, Wallace found that appreciation for observational facts he had gathered in the field was not accompanied by agreement with his theoretical interpretations and methods for doing human biogeography.

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Science along the Railroad: Expanding Field Work in the US Central West

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Prospecting for dinosaurs on the mining frontier: The value of information in America’s Gilded Age

Prospecting for dinosaurs on the mining frontier: The value of information in America’s Gilded Age

Lay Observers, Telegraph Lines, and Kansas Weather: The Field Network as a Mode of Knowledge Production

Wallace’s Other Line: Human Biogeography and Field Practice in the Eastern Colonial Tropics

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