The weavers of memories (03)
II. Archives and natural sciences. The frame and the weft (B)
[This post is the third of a series in which I will share a text entitled Los tejedores de memorias (“The weavers of memories”), which I produced as the final work for my master’s degree in Historical Archives and Memory at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota (Colombia). All posts can be viewed on my website, while the original text, complete with quotes and notes, can be downloaded here].
In the field of natural science, archives are often considered spaces for historians: something foreign to the discipline. Daston writes:
…archival research is assumed to be ipso facto historical in nature, and any archive to be of the sort prototypically investigated by historians: a fixed place with a curated, often official collection consisting mostly of old unpublished papers.
The author adds that “…archives are mostly invisible in accounts of the sites and practices of science.”
Consequently, memory-related processes in the natural sciences are, to a large extent, weak. In fact, there are no well-defined boundaries between “history of science” — a huge and very fertile field of study — and “memory of science”, a subject poorly addressed in the academic literature, especially in archival science.
Added to this is the selective treatment of past and present documentation that natural scientists usually put into practice. From this enormous fabric, only certain portions are recovered and used, at convenience, ignoring the fact that these selected threads are supported by the rest of the weave. In this sense, natural scientists tend to pay special attention to a specific part of their intellectual production: that which is expressed as academic and professional literature (books, theses, articles, reports, etc.). However, science is much more than the stock made up of this formal production. It includes notes, jottings, conversations, field and personal diaries, images, drawings, sketches, films, audios, etc. It is common for all this documentation (which includes primary sources and supplementary or supporting material) to be abandoned in the margins of the long and arduous path of scientific research, and not referenced in the final products — which is equivalent to rendering it invisible in terms of retrieval.
Additionally, science focuses on the triumphal narrative — full of visible, relevant and successful results — that is often presented in the academic literature. As Bowker notes, “…scientific texts are written not to record what actually happened in the laboratory, but to tell the story of an ideal past”. In practice, however, an enormous percentage of their history is made up of mistakes, failures, and unsolvable problems, which are not usually disclosed.
Finally, the scientific universe tends to pay more attention to the big stories (famous people, institutions and funding, important or unique expeditions, discoveries that have changed the course of events), even though there is also a real accumulation of small anecdotes, events, memories, legends and secrets: a daily routine that occupies a considerable part of the time of scientific work, but which is devoid of any appeal.
The path taken by science is punctuated by a myriad of small elements that can be interwoven to form an enormous fabric, or that can be inserted as a piece in a pre-existing one to produce new meanings, questions or concerns. There is a whole enormous and magnificent scientific memory that is far from being recognized and treated as such.
With notable and rare exceptions, the disconnection between science and its memory — preserved in the archives — is evident. And worrying.
[To be continued…]
