This is a past event
William Harvey found white ants troublesome.
In Ceylon, they disrupted Harvey’s research by flying ‘into my bottles’ and becoming ‘immortalised in spirits’. Until recently, historians have tended to focus on the results of the collecting process, without much concern for the difficulties encountered by those responsible for the collection, preservation, and safe transport of specimens from the field to the museum or laboratory.
Narratives of travel and collecting invariably exalt the heroic effort of the individual to gather, assemble and record in the name of advancing scientific knowledge and understanding. This paper looks beyond their apparent successes, focusing on failures and travails, and on the practices and practicalities of ship-board travel and collecting activities. More broadly, it seeks to understand the role of space and place, as well as theoretical knowledge, in the production of data.
The discussion focuses on the example of William Harvey who travelled to Australia in pursuit of seaweed in 1853. What might appear, at first glance, to be a specialised and slightly abstruse academic exercise was, in fact, fundamentally shaped by the material culture, embodied knowledge, and physical constraints encountered by Harvey on the way.
On one level, shipboard and on-shore collecting activities were facilitated by the connections forged by new technologies and Britain’s global empire. But they also depended on specific contexts and relied on local agents and actors, as well as on the physical and technical facilities (and limitations) of those doing the collecting.
The examples of Harvey and others shed light on the real, ‘lived’ experiences of individual collectors, the difficulties and challenges they encountered in amassing their collections, and the networks of people on which they relied.
- Speaker
- John McAleer (University of Southampton)
- Venue
- via Teams