This case study of the structure of the antebellum Smithsonian Institution Meteorological Project and its network of volunteers demonstrates that, although often unacknowledged and relegated to the periphery of such scientific endeavors, women contributors enabled early "big science" projects in the United States. From the project's beginning in the late 1840s, the household frequently served as the center of meteorological project data collection, and women were particularly relied upon to perform daily observation work. Close examination of project volunteer correspondence provides deeper insight into the gendered, practical operations of the project and presents a more complex depiction of who was performing data collection and contributing to scientific work in the mid-nineteenth century. The concept of fixing women's labor in the emerging middle class "domestic sphere" also held implications for conducting daily data gathering at regular intervals from a controlled location. While gender roles more often resulted in women's placement at the periphery of scientific society, their operations from rural and frontier areas enabled regular data collection from a vast distribution but also placed them at the geographic periphery of the eastern, more urban centers of science. The involvement of uncredited contributors at the periphery of American scientific communities was essential to the consistent and more complete data collection demanded by such projects of increasing scope. Further, the devalued labor of these peripheral contributors to the Smithsonian's large-scale data work set important precedent for professional scientific frameworks at the end of the century.
This case study of the structure of the antebellum Smithsonian Institution Meteorological Project and its network of volunteers demonstrates that, although often unacknowledged and relegated to the periphery of such scientific endeavors, women contributors enabled early “big science” projects in the United States. From the project’s beginning in the late 1840s, the household frequently served as the center of meteorological project data collection, and women were particularly relied upon to perform daily observation work. Close examination of project volunteer correspondence provides deeper insight into the gendered, practical operations of the project and presents a more complex depiction of who was performing data collection and contributing to scientific work in the mid-nineteenth century. The concept of fixing women’s labor in the emerging middle class “domestic sphere” also held implications for conducting daily data gathering at regular intervals from a controlled location. While gender roles more often resulted in women’s placement at the periphery of scientific society, their operations from rural and frontier areas enabled regular data collection from a vast distribution but also placed them at the geographic periphery of the eastern, more urban centers of science. The involvement of uncredited contributors at the periphery of American scientific communities was essential to the consistent and more complete data collection demanded by such projects of increasing scope. Further, the devalued labor of these peripheral contributors to the Smithsonian’s large-scale data work set important precedent for professional scientific frameworks at the end of the century.
I trace the historical development of how “problems” were staged by researchers in the sciences of psychology, computation, and design. I focus on how and why those researchers did so, and how their approaches elicited critique. By tracing conceptual and practical continuities from Edward Thorndike’s comparative psychology to Herbert Simon’s work on artificial intelligence and design, I show how problem situations were first created in laboratories, for animals and humans, then translated into programs run on stored program digital computers, and finally, used to conceptualize design expertise. Despite their claims to have created situations representative of neutral, naturally occurring problems, these researchers’ work highlights the artificial and intersubjective character of problems.
