Seminar Conveners: Dr Alex Aylward, Professor Erica Charters, Dr Hohee Cho, Professor Mark Harrison, Professor Rob Iliffe, Dr Catherine M Jackson, Dr Sloan Mahone
Seminars in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
Professor Florence Hsia (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
What’s in a table? Managing astronomical data in early modern Europe
Tables have long constituted one of the principal graphic tools through which scientists represent their understanding of the natural world. Nowhere is this more visible than in astronomy, where tabular traditions stretch back to the Babylonians of the first millennium before the common era. Origin stories of fundamental cognitive and epistemic change have relied heavily on the translation of celestial experience into tabular formats, a development said to be driven by broad media shifts (orality to literacy, script to print). In this talk, I show to the contrary that despite the affordances of print and the long history of tabular formats for astronomical purposes, early modern European scholars’ motives for sending records of astronomical observation to the press were contingent and local, as were the emerging conventions of representing such empirical data within the economy of the printed page.
