History Department Workshop
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Start time: 3:30 PM
Location: Thach 317
Please join us on Wednesday, Nov. 11 for the next installment of the History Department Workshop. Prof. Ralph Kingston will give a presentation titled "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: the geological survey of France, 1825-1841." A brief description appears below. The workshop will be in Thach 317 at 3:30PM.
In August 1827, André-Jean-François-Marie Brochant de Villiers wrote to his young colleague Léonce Élie de Beaumont, whom he had sent to conduct a geological survey of the Jura, thanking him for material delivered to the School of Mines in Paris. Brochant had particularly looked forward to working with Élie de Beaumont’s hand-colored maps, he said, but they had turned out to be impossible to interpret. Instead, he had decided to work directly with the samples, to review and reorder the accompanying rocks. This paper discusses the failure of mapping in this instance, and argues that historians have been too eager to credit cartography over other 'technologies' of spatial investigation in the period. Funded by the government, Brochant de Villiers had to produce a map, even though in scientific circles it was a flop. He and his team, however, also developed alternative modes of data representation, which would continue to structure geologists' spatial practices for the rest of the nineteenth century.
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