Today, people increasingly use digital technologies to collect data on their health, habits and wellbeing. Sociologists of science and technology have started to discuss how these developments change our notions of identity, autonomy and privacy. This two-day workshop explores the histories of these practices, looking at different forms of measurement and self-management in the 19th and 20th centuries. So far, historians have paid more attention to the role of scientists and the state in producing data about people than they have to individual practices. This workshop aims to trace the genealogies of today’s culture of quantification and to investigate the role of (personalized) quantification in the making of the modern self.
We seek to address the following questions: How were scientific techniques such as quantification applied to the individual body and household? How were sciences such as phrenology, medicine, statistics and anthropometry made personal? How did quantification change people’s understanding of themselves? How did numbers become an incentive to self-improvement? Do today’s metric practices represent change or continuity?
Confirmed speakers are: Hilary Marland & Roberta Bivins (University of Warwick) and Harro Maas (University of Lausanne)
We invite submissions on topics related (but not limited) to histories of:
- personal quantification
- self-monitoring, self-tracking and self-management
- Private numbers and public numbers
- Popular science and personal uses of quantification
- How individuals related to statistics and averages
- Measurements in the household
- Numeracy/quantitative literacy
- Accounting tools in the home
- Measureing as entertainment
- Self-surveillance
Abstracts (max. 300 words) for a 20-minute paper and a short biographical note should be sent by 6 January 2017 to Fenneke Sysling.
This workshop is organized as part of the project The Quantified Self: a history – funded through the Veni Innovational Research Incentives Scheme of the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) and with support of the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities in Utrecht. The conference organizers are Fenneke Sysling and Hieke Huistra (University of Utrecht).