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Managing American Climate Data

Sat, March 17, 8:30 to 10:00am, Riverside Convention Center, RC E

Abstract

The history of climate data is a story about the power of numerical measurement. In the nineteenth century United States, climate data was a powerful part of environmental culture precisely because it was newly numerical. This paper begins by exploring the numerical climate products that citizen scientists, institutions and academies produced throughout the early-to-mid nineteenth century as part of the Smithsonian Meteorological Project. Specifically, I argue that numerical graphics and the "language of numbers," to borrow from Arjun Appaduri, buttressed and created a coherent colonial space. But what exactly happened to this data? "Managing American Climate Data" moves on to explore the twisty travels of this climate data in nineteenth and twentieth century archives.

Questions of where weather and climate data goes is a question that has recently been asked with renewed urgency given national changes to climate change initiatives and data management under the Trump administration. Projects like Data Refuge have not only preserved massive collections of government-stored environmental data at risk of being deleted by the new administration. These projects have also illuminated questions about the vulnerability of data and its place in the archive more generally. By looking back to the mid-nineteenth-century Smithsonian Meteorological project and specifically the ways in which weather and climate data produced by this project was managed by U.S. archives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we can gain perspective on how environmental data becomes archival matter but also on the longer history of environmental data management in the United States. These perspectives will be useful as we continue to ask what data needs to be safeguarded under the new administration and how, precisely, to safeguard it.

Note: Alexis Rider has submitting a paper on Arctic climates that would pair nicely with this one.

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