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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 • • • • • • • • 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 – – – – 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 • • • • 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?