Pictorial Statistics

This essay discusses Francis Galton’s method of inductive inference where the data are photographs of human faces. His aim of induction was to determine the typical characteristics of the natural class to which the individuals belong by composing the relevant photographs in a specific photographic way. The three populations studied by Galton were people suffering tuberculosis, Jews, and criminals. This essay argues that despite the fact that Galton aimed at mechanical objectivity, subjective judgements nevertheless appear to be a necessary part of this kind of inductive inference. At first sight, this seems very much in the line of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s account of objectivity. They argue that in the twentieth century the awareness arose that mechanical-objective pictures still could contain errors that should be erased by trained judgement. Galton’s case of inductive reasoning, however, departs from this account by showing that the correct composites were achieved by a combination of mechanical procedures and untrained judgements. To arrive at the typical characterizations one first has to familiarize oneself with the data, but the familiarization should be done by someone who is not an expert on the cases under study.

Blind Data

This chapter details a blind date between two researchers who have very different notions about the nature of data and the ethos and practices of science. One is an electronic engineer, while the other is an anthropologist. The anthropologist studies how digital technology is built and used, examining the politics and praxes of some start-up companies who were developing new apps. Meanwhile, the electronic engineer works on a sound-sensing network for monitoring and modelling background noise across the city. The chapter then looks at their debate on data creation and collection. The anthropologist makes a point about scientific practice, arguing that the electronic engineer is practising mechanical objectivity — trying to minimize biases, errors, calibration issues, and so on — but it is still set up in their vision, based on their education and experience, and compromising for circumstance. Thus, they are still making choices that influence the outcome.

Cultures of Objectivity

This introductory chapter provides an overview of objectivity, the presence of which is evidently required for basic justice, honest government, and true knowledge. It differentiates disciplinary objectivity from mechanical objectivity. Mechanical objectivity has been a favorite of positivist philosophers, and it has a powerful appeal to the wider public. A faith in objectivity tends to be associated with political democracy, or at least with systems in which bureaucratic actors are highly vulnerable to outsiders. The appeal of numbers is especially compelling to bureaucratic officials who lack the mandate of a popular election, or divine right. Arbitrariness and bias are the most usual grounds upon which such officials are criticized. A decision made by the numbers (or by explicit rules of some other sort) has at least the appearance of being fair and impersonal. Scientific objectivity thus provides an answer to a moral demand for impartiality and fairness. Quantification is a way of making decisions without seeming to decide. Objectivity lends authority to officials who have very little of their own.

Photograph as Skin, Skin as Wax: Indexicality and the Visualisation of Syphilis in Fin-de-Siècle France The William Bynum Prize Essay

In early twentieth-century France, syphilis and its controversial status as a hereditary disease reigned as a chief concern for physicians and public health officials. As syphilis primarily presented visually on the surface of the skin, its study fell within the realms of both dermatologists and venereologists, who relied heavily on visual evidence in their detection, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease. Thus, in educational textbooks, atlases, and medical models, accurately reproducing the visible signposts of syphilis – the colour, texture, and patterns of primary chancres or secondary rashes – was of preeminent importance. Photography, with its potential claims to mechanical objectivity, would seem to provide the logical tool for such representations.Yet photography’s relationship to syphilographie warrants further unpacking. Despite the rise of a desire for mechanical objectivity charted in the late nineteenth century, artist-produced, three-dimensional, wax-cast moulages coexisted with photographs as significant educational tools for dermatologists; at times, these models were further mediated through photographic reproduction in texts. Additionally, the rise of phototherapy complicated this relationship by fostering the clinical equation of the light-sensitive photographic plate with the patient’s skin, which became the photographic record of disease and successful treatment. This paper explores these complexities to delineate a more nuanced understanding of objectivity vis-à-vis photography and syphilis. Rather than a desire to produce an unbiased image, fin-de-siècle dermatologists marshalled the photographic to exploit the verbal and visual rhetoric of objectivity, authority, and persuasion inextricably linked to culturally constructed understandings of the photograph. This rhetoric was often couched in the Peircean concept of indexicality, which physicians formulated through the language of witness, testimony, and direct connection.

Situated Expert Judgement

In this paper we discuss the kind of expert judgement demanded by the development of a particular class of models known as “Quantitative Structure-Activities Relationship” (QSAR) models, used to predict the toxicity of chemical substances, for regulatory and other purposes. We analyse the production of these models, and attempts at standardizing them. We show that neither a technical nor a procedural standardization is possible. As a consequence, QSAR models cannot ground a production of knowledge along the lines of “mechanical objectivity” or “regulatory objectivity”. Instead, QSAR models imply that expert judgement is situated, re-worked for each new case, and implies an active intervention of the individual expert. This has important consequences for risk governance based on models. It makes transparency a central concern. It also means that new asymmetries emerge, between companies developing sophisticated models and individual experts in regulatory agencies in charge of assessing these models.