03 Nov 2018 09:00 AM - 11:45 AM(America/Vancouver)
20181103T090020181103T1145America/VancouverBodies of Formalization
This panel explores intersections between human bodies and formal systems in the twentieth-century. The panel cuts across the history of forensics, mathematics, computing, and dance in order to demonstrate how different communities have worked to erase bodies, represent bodies, control bodies, identify bodies, and classify bodies through formalization. We recover and reconstruct the technologies, practices, aesthetics, and politics that inform twentieth-century formalisms, so often touted as neutral abstractions. Kelly Gates’ paper explores Alphonse Bertillon’s crime-scene photographs, their place in his forensic classification project and their recent resurgence as a subject of museum exhibition, emphasizing the historical significance of police uses of photography. Clare Kim demonstrates how formal axiomatic methods developed in early twentieth-century mathematics were used to erase racial and cultural difference among mathematicians, especially within American efforts to appropriate Chinese and Japanese mathematics. Stephanie Dick explores early efforts to formalize and automate facial recognition at the University of Texas at Austin, the problematic norms built into this software, and the competing standards of identification that surrounded its use. And Whitney Laemmli investigates an attempt to formalize movement and dance in the mid-twentieth century that had the effect of erasing the creative contributions of dancers themselves. Together, these papers explore how race, creativity, criminality, and identity have been encoded in formal systems, those hallmarks of modernity, through particular configurations of technology, practice, politics, and aesthetics.
Organized by Stephanie Dick (University of Pennsylvania)
Medina, Third FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
This panel explores intersections between human bodies and formal systems in the twentieth-century. The panel cuts across the history of forensics, mathematics, computing, and dance in order to demonstrate how different communities have worked to erase bodies, represent bodies, control bodies, identify bodies, and classify bodies through formalization. We recover and reconstruct the technologies, practices, aesthetics, and politics that inform twentieth-century formalisms, so often touted as neutral abstractions. Kelly Gates’ paper explores Alphonse Bertillon’s crime-scene photographs, their place in his forensic classification project and their recent resurgence as a subject of museum exhibition, emphasizing the historical significance of police uses of photography. Clare Kim demonstrates how formal axiomatic methods developed in early twentieth-century mathematics were used to erase racial and cultural difference among mathematicians, especially within American efforts to appropriate Chinese and Japanese mathematics. Stephanie Dick explores early efforts to formalize and automate facial recognition at the University of Texas at Austin, the problematic norms built into this software, and the competing standards of identification that surrounded its use. And Whitney Laemmli investigates an attempt to formalize movement and dance in the mid-twentieth century that had the effect of erasing the creative contributions of dancers themselves. Together, these papers explore how race, creativity, criminality, and identity have been encoded in formal systems, those hallmarks of modernity, through particular configurations of technology, practice, politics, and aesthetics.
Organized by Stephanie Dick (University of Pennsylvania)
Policing, Forensics, and the Social History of Photography: Bertillon’s Crime-Scene Photographs and their Museum DisplayView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHuman and Social Sciences09:00 AM - 09:41 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 16:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 16:41:00 UTC
Most histories of photography, including social histories, make only passing reference to forensic photography or other police uses of the medium, if any mention at all. Art historian Alan Sekula called for a more expansive social history of photography that included police archives in his now classic 1986 essay, “The Body and the Archive.” Sekula’s article is one of the first English-language examinations of 19th Century French police official Alphonse Bertillon, who is now widely credited with developing the first standardized techniques of both mug-shot and crime-scene photography. Since then, much has been written about Bertillon’s system of anthropometry, for criminal identification, with some attention to his innovations of both the mug shot and a system of mug-shot indexing. Much less has been said about Bertillon’s crime-scene photography. This paper begins to piece together the unexamined history of crime-scene photography, starting with Bertillon’s vertical-perspective photographs of murdered bodies, which have recently resurfaced in a number of museum exhibitions in New York, Paris and London. Bertillon's systems represent an earlier moment in the modernization of the forensic sciences, the technology of photography, and the institution of policing—each entangled with one another. I argue that innovations in police and forensic photography have played a central role in the modernization of both the policing and the forensic sciences, and in the development of the decisively modern medium of photography as such, and that the modernity of police and forensic photography is nowhere more apparent than when displayed in the museum exhibition.
Kelly Gates Communication And Science Studies, UC San Diego
Lost in Translation: Symbolic Formalisms and Mathematical Embodiment in the History of MathematicsView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHuman and Social Sciences09:41 AM - 10:22 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 16:41:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 17:22:00 UTC
Historians of mathematics have increasingly appreciated the role of written practice and bodily perception in producing mathematical research. In treating the relationship between thought and symbolic formalisms, for instance, they now avoid reproducing notions of universal and disembodied cognition. Yet little attention has been paid to how notions of disembodied cognition came to be in the first place. This talk examines how historians of mathematics negotiated conceptualizations of race in their studies of symbolic formalisms and their imagined relation to cognition. In particular, I focus on the efforts by David Eugene Smith and Yoshio Mikami to produce a history of Chinese and Japanese mathematics for an American readership in the early twentieth century. Analyzing their efforts to translate and categorize mathematics of the “Orient,” I show how Smith and Mikami’s assertions of equating “Oriental” mathematics with the formalized axiomatic approach of the early 1900s depended upon treating mathematicians monolithically, without regard to changes and differences of racial ideology.
Clare Kim HASTS, Massachusetts Institute Of Technology
"The Standard Head": Identification, Formalization, and Standardization in an Early Facial Recognition ProgramView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHuman and Social Sciences10:22 AM - 11:03 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 17:22:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 18:03:00 UTC
The Kaplan Daguerreotype dates from the early 1840s and is thought by some to depict the young Abraham Lincoln. Competing authorities, from historians to reconstructive surgeons, have weighed in with their professional opinions as to whether or not the man in the image is the former president. In the early 1970s, a computer program developed at the University of Texas at Austin added its automated determination to the debate. The program did not settle the conversation, however, but instead highlighted just how difficult it was to formalize faces for automated recognition, especially among competing standards of identification. This talk explores that computer program, among the first of its kind, its design, and its place in conversations about automated identification from the daguerreotype debate to the New York State Police Department. For some forms of pattern recognition like letters and numerals, an automated point-by-point comparison could be relatively successful at the time. This method did not work well for faces, however, because photos of the same person differ a great deal point-by-point depending on factors like head rotation and lighting. The developers at UTA therefore sought to correct photographs for deviations from “face forward” before looking for a match. To do this, they introduced a “Standard Head” whose facial proportions would be assumed of all faces as a starting point from which to measure deviation and correct for rotation and tilt. The program serves as a window into the competing expertise and racial norms that characterized early automated facial recognition.
Noise in the System: Recording and Erasure in Mid-Century American DanceView Abstract Part of Organized SessionHuman and Social Sciences11:03 AM - 11:44 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 18:03:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 18:44:00 UTC
In the early 1940s, a New York City organization known as the Dance Notation Bureau (DNB) began a decades-long effort to promote a system known as “Labanotation.” Using a combination of shapes, shading, dots, and lines on a eleven-column vertical score, Labanotation was designed to capture the ephemeral, three-dimensional complexity of dance on the flat surface of paper. Eschewing notions that dance was too emotional, evanescent, or complicated to be documented, the women who ran the DNB saw the moving body as swarming with potential data points. To them, a dance was information, and—with the right system in place—that information could be “objectively” and “scientifically” recorded. Doing so would catapult dance into the modern era, finally freeing the field from its “primitive” and “illiterate” past.
Focusing on the period between 1940 and 1975, this paper catalogues the DNB’s efforts to record and preserve movement, and explores how these efforts contributed to broader transformations in the definitions of creativity, preservation, authorship, and dance itself. In particular, it argues that the DNB ironically promoted a vision of dance in which dancers were conspicuously absent. Reduced to mere noise in an otherwise rationalized recording system, dancers’ individual expression became a difficulty to be solved rather than an integral aspect of the creative work. They were, to borrow a phrase from information theorist Claude Shannon, simply “statistical and unpredictable perturbations,” distorting the transmission of dance’s clear signal, a view that drew on deeply gendered and raced conceptions of human creativity.
