Elena Aronova: The Cold War and the Politics of Big Data in Environmental Sciences, 1957-1972.
Lecture of "Neuere Perspektiven der Wissenschaftsgeschichte"
11.07.2013 um 16:00 Uhr
Do databases have politics?
Explicit political motivations—along with military patronage—stood behind big international projects of world-wide data collection on the global environment in the 1950s and 1960s. The large cooperative undertakings in the earth and life sciences, whose motivation had been primarily to collect data on Earth as a whole, have, of course, a long history. However, global data collection gained momentum in the aftermath of World War II, acquiring a renewed significance as part of Big Science in a world shaped by the Cold War. The lecture will present a work-in-progress report on a current research project which explores how the “politics of Big Data” affected the development of database practices in the environmental sciences on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Zeit: 11.07.2013, 16-18 Uhr
Ort: Seminarraum 1402 im Bibliotheksbau des Deutschen Museums
In Kooperation mit der Abteilung Geschichte Ost- und Südosteuropas