ECU Libraries Catalog

Immeasurable weather : meteorological data and settler colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy / Sara J. Grossman.

Author/creator Grossman, Sara J. author.
Format Book and Print
Publication Info Durham : Duke University Press, 2023.
Descriptionxiv, 246 pages : facsimiles ; 23 cm.
Subject(s)
Series Elements
Elements (Duke University Press) ^A1398490
Contents Dreaming data : locating early nineteenth-century weather data -- Gendering data : the women of the Smithsonian Meteorological Project -- Data in the sky : scientific kites, settler masculinity, and quantifying the air -- Data's edge : Cleaning Data and Dust Bowl crisis -- Ugly data in the age of satellites and extreme weather.
Abstract "Immeasurable Weather demonstrates how the quantitative data produced by American weather scientists as well as citizen scientists has reinforced the project of settler colonialism and altered the living environment in the process. Sara J. Grossman argues that white settlement of the land and domination of its people proceeded by breaking up the complex networks of relationality that bind together the human and non-human worlds. Erasing the relational models of ecology that form the basis of Indigenous environmental knowledge, the emergent discipline of data science-born specifically from the desire to quantify weather-instead reproduced the natural world and natural phenomena as a set of isolated objects to be measured, owned, and exploited. Immeasurable Weather explores the relationship between climate data and state power in key moments in the history of American weather science: the public data-gathering practices of settler farmers and teachers in the 19th century that would later form the basis of the United States Weather Bureau; the centrality of women to data collection and computation, particularly through the Smithsonian Meteorological Project; the automation of weather data in the Dust Bowl of the early 20th century; and, finally, the role of meteorological satellites in data science's formal integration into American "military-meteorological nation-state structures.""-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography noteIncludes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in other formOnline version: Grossman, Sara J. Immeasurable weather. Durham : Duke University Press, 2023 9781478027034
Genre/formHistory.
LCCN 2023002942
ISBN9781478025023 (paperback)
ISBN1478025026
ISBN9781478020059 (hardcover)
ISBN1478020059
ISBN(ebook)

Available Items

Library Location Call Number Status Item Actions
Joyner New Books QC983 .G796 2023 ✔ Available Place Hold