scholarly journals Shaping the Unruly Statistician

2021 ◽  
pp. 130-149
Author(s):  
Theodore M. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
English Language ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Agriculture Education ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Social Surveys ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Scientific Fields

Statistics achieved something like disciplinary status in universities as a mathematical and methodological field during the first half of the twentieth century. Yet the experience of statistics stands as a warning against the supposition that scientific knowledge tends naturally to become a discrete discipline. Centuries prior to the consolidation of the mathematical field of statistics, there arose, gradually, a social and administrative field of statistics. Some of the most fundamental concepts and tools of statistical reasoning were first established in this context. Census offices and statistical bureaus devoted to economic, medical, trade, and labor statistics behave in some ways like scientific fields, and in recent times have been more or less closely allied to the mathematical field. From the late nineteenth century, the mathematical field of statistics also came to be seen as a set of concepts and tools for analyzing data in a variety of fields, from engineering, agriculture, education, medicine, and social surveys to astronomy, psychology, economics, sociology, ecology, and physical sciences. All of these gave some heed to the statistical discipline, but none were quite content to mathematicians and methodologists of quantification who dictate the appropriate tools to be used in diverse substantive disciplines. At the same time, input from the substantive disciplines and even from bureaucratic and professional uses has always been important for the shaping of the statistical discipline, which first took shape primarily as a field devoted to problems of evolution, genetics, and eugenics. That history shows a geographical trajectory, arising most prominently in Britain and spreading most readily to other English-language countries.

Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century India

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.

Chinese toms in the making of the drum kit: Localization and exoticism

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
New Music ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century saw the drum kit emerge as an assemblage of musical instruments that was central to much new music of the time and especially to the rise of jazz. This article is a study of Chinese drums in the making of the drum kit. The notions of localization and exoticism are applied as conceptual tools for interpreting the place of Chinese drums in the early drum kit. Why were distinctly Chinese drums used in the early drum kit? How did the Chinese drums shape the future of the drum kit? The drum kit has been at the heart of most popular music throughout the twentieth century to the present day, and, as such, this article will be beneficial to educators, practitioners and scholars of popular music education.

scholarly journals Hearing through the théâtrophone: Sonically constructed spaces and embodied listening in the late nineteenth-century French theatre

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Van Drie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Teenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
French Theatre ◽  
Subscription Service ◽  
Theoretical Reflection ◽  
A Performance

This article presents a historical and theoretical reflection of the théâtrophone, a late nine- teenth-century telephone broadcast service that allowed users at a distance to listen in live to local theatre performances (spoken theatre, opera and musical concerts). Often cited as the first binaural experience in 1881, the théâtrophone’s much longer history as a subscription service, which operated in Paris from 1889 through the mid-1930s, is relatively unknown. This article considers what hearing through a théâtrophone meant to nineteenth- and twentieth- century users beyond its initial 1881 prototype. To hear through the théâtrophone means adopting a methodology mirroring the artefact itself: moving between social, professional, artistic, sensory registers. In doing so, the ways in which the théâtrophone was attuned to dis- course and practice emerge, as do more subtle processes involved in new nineteenth-century constructs of hearing and listening. Precisely the théâtrophone’s development is examined in relation to its particular social context: its installation on the spectacular Parisian boulevards and its relation to fin de siècle theatre culture. The article first investigates how theatrophonic listening was accorded to existent practices of theatre-going. Second, the article explores the more radical propositions of the théâtrophone in relation to important aesthetic and prac- tical changes occurring simultaneously in theatre culture. The théâtrophone’s virtual sonic experience multiplied the forms of a performance and its modalities of creation and recep- tion. Through accounts of ‘listening in’ the aspects of the new sonically constructed space are described, as are postures of early mediatised listening. The article posits that new modalities of listening are articulated through the théâtrophone, with certain users, including Proust, defining it as a monitoring and creative tool. In this capacity, ‘theatrophonic’ listening contrib- uted to the development of a refined ear, capable of detecting sonic nuance, which was central to artistic sensibilities at the time. 

scholarly journals The Irish Céilí: A Site for Constructing, Experiencing, and Negotiating a Sense of Community and Identity

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. Foley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Dance ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
A Site ◽  
Changing Role ◽  
Important Site

For over a hundred years the Irish céilí, as an ‘invented’ social dance event and mode of interaction, has played a significant and changing role. This paper examines the invention of this Irish dance event and how it has developed in Ireland throughout the twentieth century. From the Gaelic League's cultural nationalist, ideological agenda of the late nineteenth century, for a culturally unified Ireland, to the manifestation of a new cultural confidence in Ireland, from the 1970s, this paper explores how the céilí has provided an important site for the construction, experiencing and negotiation of different senses of community and identity.

Reading Rooms for Travelling Cultures: English-Language Reading Rooms in Late Nineteenth-Century France

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-206
Author(s):  
Colette Colligan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Transit Routes

This essay focuses on British and American reading rooms at the end of the nineteenth century in French travel centres such as Boulogne-sur-Mer, Cannes, and Paris. These reading rooms were sites of transit that reveal the travelling cultures of Britons and Americans. They set in motion certain travel sociabilities and practices, suggested various transit routes and itineraries, promoted different cultural and national affiliations and identities, and collected, represented, and displayed anglophone cultures. They operated as microcosms of British and American cultures, offering essentialized experiences and connections with people, behaviour, and things affiliated with home, but this essay shows how they were also social environments that not only reinforced, but also reshaped and interrogated anglophone cultures on the move in British, American, and French cultural territories.

The Book as Waste: Henry Mayhew and the Fall of Paper Recycling

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Price
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Electronic Media ◽  
Wood Pulp ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Pulp Paper ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter suggests that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper in the late nineteenth century and then of plastics in the twentieth. The chapter then looks at Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media. Mayhew's “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.

British Shipping from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Liner Shipping ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Shipping Industry ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Government

This essay charts the considerable decline of the British shipping industry in the twentieth century. Sarah Palmer demonstrates that growing distance between shipowners and shipbuilders; tremendous decline in liner shipping; unwillingness to innovate; and inconsistent policies established by the government that played significant roles in the decline from the turn of the century’s forty percent global tonnage rates to the meagre three percent reported in 2007.

Childbearing and Childrearing

2019 ◽  
pp. 18-43
Author(s):  
Brianna Theobald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Older Women ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Government Employees ◽  
Pregnancy And Childbirth ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter lays the groundwork for the book’s use of the Crow Reservation in Montana as an extended case study. After providing an overview of Crow history to the late nineteenth century, the chapter sketches the parameters of a Crow birthing culture that prevailed in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. Crow women navigated pregnancy and childbirth within female generational networks; viewed childbirth as a sex-segregated social process; and placed their trust in the midwifery services of older women. The chapter further explores government employees’ attitudes toward and interventions in Indigenous pregnancy, childbirth, and especially family life in these years, as these ostensibly private domains emerged as touchstones in the federal government’s ongoing assimilation efforts.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Gavin Miller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Psychological Knowledge ◽  
Reflexive Function ◽  
And Function ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

For the purposes of this book, science fiction is defined broadly in the terms advanced by Darko Suvin, with a focus on the genre from the late nineteenth century onwards. Psychology is conceived as the modern Western discipline, running from the origins of experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century to the ascendance of neuroscience as a disciplinary rival in the late twentieth century. Five different functions for psychological discourses in science fiction are proposed. The didactic-futurological function educates the non-specialist through extrapolation of psychological technologies, teaching within the context of futurological forecasting. The utopian function anchors in historical possibility the imagining of a currently non-existent society, whether utopian or dystopian. The cognitive-estranging function defamiliarizes and denaturalizes social reality by extrapolating current social tendencies and/or construct unsettling fictional analogues of the reader’s world. The metafictional function self-consciously thematizes within narrative fiction the psychological origins, nature, and function of science fiction as a genre. The reflexive function addresses the construction of individuals and groups who have reflexively adopted the ‘truth’ of psychological knowledge.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document