A lifetime of unfinished projects has taught me one good thing: how to start enthusiastically. Four days after arriving in St Andrews for my master's degree, I sat down in the library with Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopedia and began making my way through its five hundred and thirty-four pages.* (This process was hindered by authors Briggs and Calder's alphabetical arrangement of their fifty subjects and my determination to read through the biographies in more or less chronological order; needless to say, the plans of Briggs and Calder were foiled by my compulsive tendencies.) An account of the lives and passions of fifty classicists was exactly what I needed to orient myself in the discipline, and the understanding I gained of the history of classics has proved highly useful since; I am thankful for the coincidence that I found that book on that day.

I wasn't looking for a history of how some of those very classicists shaped contemporary views of objectivity when I searched the Durham library website this morning for "Ancient Greek textual criticism", but I have once again found exactly what I was looking for by not looking for it. Daston and Galison's Objectivity was cited frequently in some of the early chapters of Values of Precision, enough that I thought I might want to get around to reading it someday; after running across Daston's chapter in the unenticingly named The Making of the Humanities, Volume III today, I am eager to track down a copy. More importantly, I am newly affirmed in the importance of my new discipline, which appears to be something called 'history of science'.

In St Andrews, my nearly-new discipline was Classics--Ancient Greek literature, specifically. I'd squeezed a classical lit major out of my final three semesters at UNC-Chapel Hill (not at all recommended, but pleasant times were nevertheless had). Classical Scholarship had helped me see what kind of research could be done in Classics and what kind of training you needed to do it. Similarly, Lorraine Gaston's chapter of The Making of the Humanities is exactly the kind of thing I want to read, and exactly the kind of thing I think--even after millennia of historical research--needs writing. I am surprised to find myself technically occupying the Ancient History side of the Durham department, rather than the Classics side; it is nice to be reassured that I am possibly in the right spot after all. That would mean that I need to learn how to become a historian, however, which sounds like a lot of work at the moment.

Key concepts that I need to keep tracing from Daston 2015:

  • Objectivity--or as Daston frames it in this chapter, objectivity versus impartiality. Does impartiality overlap exactly with the concept of 'disinterestedness', so important in the eighteenth century and vanishing in the next? Daston doesn't say; perhaps she and Galison discuss this in the longer book.
  • 'Epistemic virtues'--these came up fairly often in Berrey's Hellenistic Science at Court, which I found fascinating; they seem highly relevant to my project. Need to read more about the history of this term and its significant uses.
  • Thucydides I.22--I knew that {akribeia}** came up in Thucydides, I think (thanks TLG!), but I hadn't thought about that fact in quite a while. I'm still trying to figure out where exactly Ancient Greek historical writing fits into my dissertation outline--a section on 'rhetorical uses of accuracy & precision' keeps not quite fitting in where I want it to--but maybe there's a closer link than I had realized between Greek historiography and Alexandrian textual criticism (the latter of which is what I had intended to read up on this morning). Maybe {akribeia} in writing history & Homer is what I need; maybe this is finally the connection that will turn my pages and pages of notes into a coherent whole...
  • 'Big Science', to use Daston's term--absolutely fascinating the way she traced the origins of highly collaborative and highly methodical research projects in, say, nuclear physics to 19th century historiographical projects like Mommsen's Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. I've been reading up on 20th century science megaprojects (the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions, et al.) for an idea that I had last week for a novel. I absolutely have not started to write the novel (well, except for a few paragraphs), and of course my dissertation takes priority, so it doesn't even matter if I see connections between the novel and what I'm reading for my PhD--but the synergy is exhilarating. I may start a new Scrivener file, just so I can take notes for the novel as well....
  • Networks--fascinating also the way she stresses the importance of apprenticeship-like research seminar groups in establishing historical methodologies. This features connects both with a number of chapters in Values of Precision, which emphasized how standards are negotiated by networks (cf. especially M. Norton Wise's 'traveling numbers' concept), and with the image of a mathematical network described in Netz's 2002 chapter (and elsewhere in Netz's writing, I think). I'm sure this broader topic has connections with Steven Johnstone's A History of Trust in Ancient Greece, but at the moment I can't think what they are.
  • Daston's conclusion--a fascinatingly negative take on objectivity as a whole--not just in its potential for facilitating distortion of history, or the posing of wrong-headed questions, but for its social effects. I don't know exactly the extent to which I agree with that negativity, but I love so much being forced to reevaluate. What a marvelous idea, this 'history of science'. How relevant. How important. How interesting. Someone should write a novel about a science historian time-traveling to 1940....

The soundtrack for today's work has been 1940's instrumentals: if I can't let myself work on the fiction project, I can at least listen to the characters' music and pretend that I'm working in a coffee shop, rather than my sister's childhood bedroom.

*Thank goodness my 879,453-word journal has a search function. I finished Classical Scholarship four days later, in case you were wondering. In case you weren't--well, all I'll say is that future generations were grateful for Samuel Pepys.

**I systematically use braces {} to denote a word which has been transliterated. You should, too, because a) it reduces ambiguity; b) nobody is using braces for anything else; c) braces are a standard feature of keyboards, whereas italicizing can be a pain; d) it reduces the ugliness of transliterated words like {'istorih}; and e) I wouldn't have to keep writing this footnote.