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John Snow, Cholera Map, London (1854)
Two Images Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (1798)
Making Up People (and
Ourselves)
Man is born, grows up, and dies,
according to certain laws which have
never been properly investigated, either
as a whole or in the mode of their
mutual reactions
-- Quetelet 1842
New Ways to See the World
• Mid 19th century--1900: The Rise of Statistical
Thought
– Patterns in Societies
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Numbers of Murders Consistent
Disease Regularities
Morbidity/Mortality
Fecundity
Marriage
Employment/Unemployment
Economy
Etc.
Tables
• People started collecting lots of Data
– CENSUS
– Birth
– Death
– Marriage
– Taxes
– Property
Quetelet and the Law of
Errors
• The Normal Curve
– Quetelet Belgian Astronomer
– Knew about the Law of Errors
– Maybe societies also had a “norm” or
followed the normal curve?
The Normal/Error Curve
New Visions of Population
– The Idea of the homme type
• Did studies of body size
• Human bodies from the same geography cluster around
a mean
• There is an Ideal NORMAL Person
– Not a REAL individual--based on Population
– Height, Morbidity, Mortality, Lifetime, Fecundity, Fertility,
Psychology, etc.
• Bodies that “err” from this “mean” are
deviant/pathological
Predictions of Mortality Rates and Human Strength
Ideal “Model” For Human Body and Life Time
People and Curves
• Societies Can be Modeled and
Visualized
– Pictures Can Produce Ideas about Society
– Social Planning Possible
• New Types of Patterns and People
– Race/Gender/Criminals/Poor/Citizens/”Aliens”
• New Ways to Think about Human Life
– What Assumptions went into these graphs?
• Lifestyle? Behavior? Reproduction?
Visualizing Statistics in the
19th Century
• Francis Galton
– Eugenics/Social Science
• Composite Photography
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Photograph of “Normal” Curve
Many Photos Superimposed on One Plate
Picture of Type--Criminals, Jews, Races
Only Show “similarities” between Photos--aggregation of
features
– Similar to Morph programs or facial recognition today?
• Civil Libertarians think so!
Francis Galton
Galton Composites: Criminal and Jew: 1870‘s
Natural History Museum, NYC.
Other types of normals? How does normality feed into idea of nature and culture? How does
invention of “race” as a biological and visible category inform politics?
Modern Individual
Identification
• Alphonse Bertillon (Paris Police 1880-1890’s)
– Developed Anthropometry, Mug Shot,
Passport, Fingerprints
– New System to Document, Archive, and
Visualize the Individual
– Organized According to the “Normal”
Curve
– Identifying Individuals ALWAYS in
Reference to Population!!
Bertillon
Table of Traits
Measurement of Skull (Full Face)
Norms and “Databases”
Producing the Normal Body
• Bertillon, Galton, Quetelet
– Built ways to classify people
– Different techniques to try to organize people into “types” or
identities--More complex methods emerged
– The graph always correlates with ways to store and relate
data--the file cabinet, the archive, the database
– What are the bias? What assumptions go into assuming a
“normal”?
– What are the benefits/drawbacks of thinking about ourselves
this way?
Prediction
• Statistics as a New Way to THINK
– Predictive
– Probabilistic
• Curve is a CHANCE
– Not Mapping a Fact
– Mapping a possibility/probability that something will happen
• A New Way to “See”
– Statistics make patterns visible
– Statistics produce new ideas about identity and nation
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Gendered Bodies
Citizens
Criminals/Race
Diseased…and so forth
Other Visions-The Honorific
Queen Victoria (1890)
Two Images Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (1798)
The panopticon is the imagined vision that links this shadow archive of
population to the isolated individual in his cell who has to be normal even
if does not know who is being compared too.
Questions to Contemplate:
1) What is an archive? Discuss the
“shadow archive” as it relates to
Sekula .
2) Discuss the two modes of
representation: honorific and
repressive.
3) What is the tension between
individuals and groups?
4) What is the problem photography
poses for representation and
statistics? How do we understand
Galton and Bertillon together?
What about Today?
Where does Population Emerge
• Clouds
• Google searches
• Facebook-Social Networks
– categories
– Personalization
– marketing
Pagerank Algorithm
You are seeing a statistical and architectural vision of the web
related to power functions
Vilfred Pareto 1848-1923
a Pareto distribution, which is a power law probability distribution. The Pareto principle was named after him and
built on observations of his such as that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto
Does Political Economy Have
a Statistical Model??
DEMOCRACY=NORMAL
CURVE
GLOBALIZATION? NETWORKS? POWER FUNCTIONS?
SOMETHING ELSE?
Most important cities and links in the global city network
according to Derudder and Witlox (2005)
Strategies--Subjectivity
CK One Ads from the mid to late 1990’s
Strategies (cont.)
Apple Ad-2007-08
Modulation and Management
• User Driven—Social Networking
• Away from uniform identity to personalization
• The End of the Normal Curve?
• DSM V: Spectrum Disease Classification ( “Risk
Syndroms” (for example)
» Attack on Disciplinary Authority
» “Getting Well isn’t Enough”
» Management over “Cure”
Self-Surveillance/Personalization
• Pharmaceutical/self-therapeutic/etc.
• Web cams/ Blogs/ Social networking Sites
• Does Surveillance work differently or the same in
today’s society then for Foucault or Sekula? What
can we see about the systems that our data is fed into? How much can we tell
about the algorithms, or data, used to determine so much?