That Undisclosed World: Eric Shipton’s Mountains of Tartary (1950).

Mountains of Tartary (1950) recounts Eric Shipton’s mountaineering and travels in Xinjiang during his two postings as British Consul-General in Kashgar in the 1940s. An accomplished Himalayan mountaineer of the 1930s, Shipton was a successful author of mountaineering travel books. During the 1930s his work with the Survey of India saw him increasingly drawn into the workings of the imperial security state in the geopolitically sensitive border regions of the Karakoram. Shipton’s proven ability to travel in arduous mountain terrain and gather geographical intelligence led to his posting to Kashgar. Details of his diplomatic work are almost entirely absent from Mountains of Tartary and only became known in outline in 1969, with the publication of his autobiography. With unparalleled knowledge of the geo-political situation in Xinjiang in the 1940s, Shipton was prevented from publishing anything that revealed the details of his role in Great Game politics in 1950, not least by the fact that he still held a consular position in Kunming, Yunnan. Thus at the heart of Mountains of Tartary is an occlusion. This paper will examine the rhetorical strategies Shipton employed in writing a book in which so much had to remain undisclosed. He was aware that the roles he played, as mountaineer, explorer and traveller had multiple meanings on the borders of British India, that to situate his narrative within an Orientalist and Great Game tradition risked unwanted disclosure. The essential unreliability of the narrative emerges as a consequence of writing under such constraints. Intentionally aporetic, the text is riven by chronological and biographical voids, unintentionally reveals the strain of inhabiting multiple personas and keeping track of the competing demands of different audiences. Shipton’s failure of self-censorship erupts in transgressive revelations, concealed messages to certain sections of his readership able to read between the lines, revealing Mountains of Tartary to be a steganographic text, one that needs not just decoding but looking beyond, to what is undisclosed and unsaid

Jakob Bielfeld (1717–1770) and the diffusion of statistical concepts in eighteenth century Europe

International audiencePublished between 1760 and 1770, Bielfeld's writings prove that scholars of the time were acquainted with the concepts of both political arithmetic and German statistik, long before they merged into a new discipline at the beginning the following century. It is argued here that these works may have been an important source of diffusion of statistical concepts at the end of the eighteenth century. Bielfeld is now almost completely forgotten, and the reasons for his lack of fame in posterity are examined

The eye of the needle: magnetic survey and the compass of capital in the age of revolution and reform

This thesis charts the globalising role of British geomagnetism in the age of revolution and reform. In the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, significant fiscal-military state resources were directed toward linking three momentous magnetic enterprises: Admiralty reform of practical magnetic navigation; novel electromagnetic research; and British engagement in an international campaign to survey the earth’s magnetism. From hardware to personnel, these resources were heavily invested with certain principles of labour organisation. In the late eighteenth and earlier nineteenth century industrial materials such as copper, paper, and glass, were remanufactured into new forms designed to depend upon extreme systems of labour extraction. Iron best embodies this transformation. In order to chart the globalising role of British geomagnetism this thesis follows the interests of magnetic administrators and military mathematicians whose situated concerns were navigated by a new kind of iron. Particularly pivotal are the researches of Woolwich Military Academy mathematics master Peter Barlow, who took lessons from timber and torsion to make iron twist and link the three magnetic enterprises in capital bonds. The ferrous focus dictates the compass of this thesis: from Cornish mines to West Indian docks and Greenland fisheries, and its combinations: from Newcastle Town Moor to the Martinique marina. Combination, resistance, and revolution prove critical. The protests of English commons are shown to have fuelled the launch of the magnetic campaign, just as the uprisings of the Black Atlantic formed its material and theoretical infrastructure. Legislation and materials were reformed to reveal apparently natural laws, while the realities of contingency, struggle, and newer subtler forms of exploitation were lauded as inevitable progress. British geomagnetism in the age of revolution and reform charted a particular kind of extreme labour extraction embodied in a new kind of iron: a global metal in globalisation’s reconstitution of the globe.Arts and Humanities Research Council; Burke's Peerage; Antiquarian Horological Society; Scientific Instrument Society; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; Royal Observatory, Greenwich; Wolfson College, Cambridge; Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge; American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, showing the operations, expenditures, and condition of the institution for the year 1873

Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. [1585] Research related the the American Indian; acient mounds in America; etc

"Cultivating the worst form of sectarianism": conviction and controversy in the establishment of denominational colleges in Australian universities, with particular reference to the University of Queensland and to the centenary of St Leo's College.

The University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia were the last two of Australia’s six universities established by World War II. Both were established early in the 1900s, with Queensland’s university declared a “people’s university” that was to be different from the earlier universities of the 1800s – it was to be “a thoroughly unsectarian university” with “no residential colleges”. It was established on the site of the old Government House, but soon denominational colleges were set up in association with it, but close to rather than on its campus. Two leading Brisbane churchmen at the time, Catholic Archbishop James Duhig and Anglican Archbishop St Clair Donaldson, were strong supporters of both the University and of establishing church colleges, and St John’s (Anglican) College was set up in 1912 and St Leo’s (Roman Catholic) College in 1917. Emmanuel College (Presbyterian) also opened in 1912, and Kings College (Methodist) in 1913. These and other colleges would later be located on the University’s campus after it moved to St Lucia in the late 1930s. Much of the denominational colleges’ development at UQ reflected the debates, issues and concerns around religion and the university in the setting up of colleges at the earlier universities, and in the establishment of the ‘second wave’ of universities and colleges in Australia after World War II. With a particular focus on St Leo’s College UQ, which celebrated its centenary in 2017, this paper seeks to affirm the distinctive role that such colleges can play in Australia’s increasingly corporate universities, and in the context of enormous growth in commercial partnership and provision of student accommodation

Science and scientists in Victorian and Edwardian literary novels: insights into the emergence of a new profession

Literary fiction has seldom been seriously considered as a mode of science communication. Here, I review novels from the 19th century canon of English literature in which characters either have, or aspire to have, substantive professional scientific roles to see what insights they provide into the practice of science in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. They reflect the historical transition of science from an intellectual hobby to a paid occupation, but also reveal that while a career in science became possible for a wider range of people, it seldom allowed these new entrants to undertake fundamental scientific research

Symbols Purely Mechanical: Language, Modernity, and the Rise of the Algorithm, 1605–1862

In recent decades, scholars in both Digital Humanities and Critical Media Studies have encountered a disconnect between algorithms and what are typically thought of as “cultural” concerns. In Digital Humanities, researchers employing algorithmic methods in the study of literature have faced what Alan Liu has called a “meaning problem”—a difficulty in reconciling computational results with traditional forms of interpretation. Conversely, in Critical Media Studies, some thinkers have questioned the adequacy of interpretive methods as means of understanding computational systems. This dissertation offers a historical account of how this disconnect came into being by examining the attitudes toward algorithms that existed in the three centuries prior to the development of the modern computer. Bringing together the histories of semiotics, poetics, and mathematics, I show that the present divide between algorithmic and interpretive methods results from a cluster of assumptions about historical change that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that implicates attempts to give meaning to algorithms in the modern narrative of technological progress. My account organizes the early-modern discourse on algorithms into three distinct intellectual traditions that arose in subsequent periods. The first tradition, which reached its peak in the mid-seventeenth century, held that the correspondence between algorithm and meaning was guaranteed by divine providence, making algorithms a potential basis for a non- arbitrary mode of representation that can apply to any field of knowledge, including poetics as well as mathematics. A second tradition, most influential from the last decades of the seventeenth century to around 1800, denied that the correspondence between algorithm and meaning was pre-ordained and sought, instead, to create this correspondence by altering the ways people think. Finally, starting in the Romantic period, algorithms and culture came to be viewed as operating autonomously from one another, an intellectual turn that, I argue, continues to inform the way people view algorithms in the present day. By uncovering this history, this dissertation reveals some of the tacit assumptions that underlie present debates about the interface between computation and culture. The reason algorithms present humanists with a meaning problem, I argue, is that cultural and technical considerations now stand in different relations to history: culture is seen as arising from collective practices that lie beyond the control of any individual, whereas the technical details of algorithms are treated as changeable at will. It is because of this compartmentalization, I maintain, that the idea of progress plays such a persistent role in discussions of digital technologies; similarly to the Modernist avant garde, computing machines have license to break with established semantic conventions and thus to lead culture in new directions. As an alternative to this technocratic arrangement, I call for two complementary practices: a philology of algorithms that resituates them in history, and a poetic approach to computation that embraces misalignments between algorithm and meaning