Elena Aronova

Citizen seismology, stalinist science, and Vladimir Mannar’s Cold Wars

This essay takes a historical view on “citizen science” by exploring its socialist version via the case of a Soviet amateur seismologist Vladimir Mannar. In the wake of the 1948 Ashgabat earthquake, which coincided with Lysenko’s victory in his campaign against genetics, Mannar launched an aborted campaign for a participatory “socialist seismology.” Mannar co-opted Lysenkoist language of science for the people and gained professional status within professional seismology but was shut out by the experts capitalizing on a “big science” imperative of cold war. Mannar’s personal experiences of navigating competing pulls of cold war seismology and his vision of “people’s seismology,” marginalized within increasingly technical and instrumental cold war science, shed light on oxymoronic nature of citizen science, and the clash between participatory vision of science and an increasing reliance on high-level technical expertise. This case provides a vantage point from which to examine the dual nature of citizen science with its dual loyalties, ambiguities, and the constantly renegotiated status of data—the raison d’être and the most tangible outcome of the initiatives unfolded on the outer fringes of academic science.

Introduction: Historicizing Big Data

The history of data brings together topics and themes from a variety of perspectives in history of science: histories of the material culture of information and of computing, the history of politics on individual and global scales, gender and women’s history, as well as the histories of many individual disciplines, to name just a few of the areas covered by essays in this volume. But the history of data is more than just the sum of its parts. It provides an emerging new rubric for considering the impact of changes in cultures of information in the sciences in the longue durée, and an opportunity for historians to rethink important questions that cross many of our traditional disciplinary categories.

Geophysical Datascapes of the Cold War: Politics and Practices of the World Data Centers in the 1950s and 1960s

The International Geophysical Year or IGY (1957–8), conceived against a background of nuclear secrecy intensified by Cold War political tensions, enabled the distinct data regime that took hold in Soviet and American World Data Centers in the 1950s and 1960s—a regime that turned data into a form of currency, traded by the political players of the Cold War. This essay examines this data regime in detail, considering, in turn, the issues of secrecy and access, sharing and exchange, accumulation and archiving, and, finally, handling and use of the IGY data. Features of the IGY’s data centers, such as the notion of centralized storage of open data, freely accessible to users from around the world, played an important role in establishing the practices of data governance that continue today. These practices, however, were outcomes of the politics, visions, and accompanying technologies that were embedded in a supportive political culture of the Cold War. By revisiting the drawbacks and challenges that accompanied the Big Data moment in the early Cold War, this essay explores multiple meanings of data, and the ways in which data participated in a subtle Cold War political economy, beyond their use (or the lack thereof) in the production of knowledge.

Earthquake prediction, biological clocks, and the cold war psy-ops: Using animals as seismic sensors in the 1970s California

A familiar story of seismology is that of a small field originally focused on local studies of earthquakes through diverse disciplinary perspectives being transformed, in the second half of the twentieth century, into a highly specialized field focused on global studies of the earths deep interior via sophisticated instruments and transnational networks of seismological stations. Against this backdrop, this essay offers a complementing account, highlighting the significance of local circumstances and disciplinary agendas that were contingent not only on transformations in the geophysical sciences but also on the concurrently changing biological sciences during the Cold War. Using examples of the studies of unusual animal behavior prior to earthquakes conducted under the auspices of the US Geological Survey on the West Coast of the United States in the 1970s, this essay examines a variety of motivations behind the attempts to bridge geophysics and biology. These examples illustrate the ways in which earthquake prediction became entangled with concerns over the use of seismological data, pioneering research on biological rhythms, and the troubled field of Cold War-driven military brain studies.

Russian and the making of world languages during the Cold War

This essay uses the case of Russian, in its relation to other languages, to look at the ways in which the architects of internationalism in the aftermath of World War II established a new hegemony of world languages, responding to the challenge posed by the rise of Russian as a scientific and political language. What was initially a campaign by the Soviet delegation at UNESCO for one cause—recognition of the status of the Russian language within the organization—was turned by other delegations into a campaign for a different cause—multilingualism. Rather than establishing Russian on a par with English and French, the Soviet intervention helped to create a new triumvirate of world languages—Russian, Spanish, and Arabic—as these were recognized by international organizations such as the United Nations and UNESCO. The case of the rise of Russian as a language of science and politics helps to underscore the complexities and the ambiguities involved in the negotiation of the language regime, in which political arguments were translated into technological choices, the diplomats’ problems were cast as a problem of communication, and the language in which political arguments were made oftentimes mattered as much as the arguments themselves.

Introduction: Science Studies in East and West—Incommensurable Paradigms?

This chapter opens the volume by recalling our lack of knowledge about the origins and foundation of science studies as a discipline. It thus examines the reasons for this gap, showing that it actually coincides with the fact that much of the science studies literature coming from non-US and non-Western European countries has been overlooked in the past. Thus reasoning on the compelling reasons that led to the project for this book, the introduction recalls the impact of the Cold War in the shaping of science studies in the West and the East and the variety of local approaches that eventually were brought together under the science studies umbrella. It recalls the content of each one of the chapters in the volume illustrating this diversity. The introduction concludes by highlighting two issues. First, that these approaches are by and large incomparable from the historical viewpoint, given their specificity in the Cold War context and—at times—their alignment to specific national policies. Second, that even if noncomparable, these studies bear important resemblances that reveal important transnational exchanges of knowledge before, during, and after the Cold War and even, at times, across the Iron Curtain.