Laboratory/Observatory

Introduction

In considering the settings where geographical knowledge is produced, the laboratory and the observatory appear, at first glance, as places safely ignored. While geography developed as a science describing and explaining variation across the earth's surface, laboratories, it has been argued, are spaces designed precisely for overcoming geographical variation, chiefly through experimental technologies and rhetorics of replicability and standardization. It is perhaps the mark of their success that knowledge produced in laboratories appears to come from nowhere, and to be applicable anywhere. The observatory, another great fixed site of modern science, has historically been oriented toward what is now ‘outer space’, not the terrestrial sphere of geography. As spaces for science's technological instrumentation, and as models for the organization of scientific work, the laboratory and the observatory would also appear to contrast sharply with those modes of spatial organization more commonly associated with the making of geographical knowledge, such as exploration, survey, and reconnaissance – all premised, seemingly unlike laboratory work, on the spatial mobility of the observer.

We do not tend to imagine the makers of geographical knowledge as residing in laboratories. Daring or blundering explorers, plucky fieldworkers, tweedy academics, yes, but a team of investigators in white lab coats, or engineers with clipboards and coveralls? These figures are caricatures, of course, but to the extent that they either meet or unsettle our expectations about the subjects of geographical knowledge, and about the diverse spaces where geographical knowledge is made, they can be highly suggestive. How has geographical knowledge been transformed in science's recent technological revolutions, and by the institutional transformations that have reshaped the modern scientific landscape?

This chapter explores the nature of geographical knowledge as a laboratory product, particularly after the rise of laboratory-based Big Science in the mid-twentieth century. It also raises questions about how laboratories and other sites of observation have themselves been transformed to accommodate geographical scientific practices. The laboratory genealogies of remotely sensed geographical imagery – the tip of the iceberg of [Page 77]a rapidly transforming, geo-referenced knowledge base (Cloud 2002; Pickles 2004) – are still easily taken for granted, whether in geographic information systems or more widely distributed Internet-based mapping systems. Meanwhile, as the evolving nature of the observatory – and space-based platforms for earth observation, and unprecedented outer space visualizations – has stretched the terrestrial limits of the observatory, the relations between the earth and the heavens, a long standing concern of ancient and early modern geographers, have once again become increasingly difficult to disentangle (Livingstone 1992; Cosgrove 2001; MacDonald 2007). The ‘final frontier,’ as Peter Redfield (2000: 259) has observed, ‘is less “finished” than reduced to the level of function, for human space now extends into outer space, with the planet itself woven into a vast technical system of satellites’. Taken together, a historical geography of laboratory and observatory, albeit sketched very loosely in this chapter, suggests not only the persistence of the laboratory but its widespread diffusion, in hybrid forms, in the trajectories of modern geographical knowledge production.

Before turning more explicitly to these trajectories, the chapter proceeds in the next section with a brief reconsideration of the laboratory as, in Knorr-Cetina's (1992) terms, an enhanced environment for producing natural knowledge and objects. If the laboratory works, in this sense, as a peculiar ‘reconfiguration of the natural and social order’ (Knorr-Cetina 1992: 113–14), then clearly the nature of laboratory sites and practices have shifted considerably over time and space. Actual laboratories, in practice, encompass a wide range of settings – not only places for housing experimental apparati but also as sites for scientific, technical and medical manufacturing and processing. At the same time, laboratory practices have not remained only at laboratories, as we conventionally think of them; they have been distributed to different social sites, and across disciplines and professions. We live in a world of testing and simulation, experiments and proving grounds. The earth itself has been fitted out to be something like a laboratory (or so we are told!), and the changing dimensions of geographical knowledge are part of these developments. Following a discussion of the interpenetration of laboratory and field sciences, the second half of the chapter turns to two profound transformations of geographical knowledge in the twentieth century: the transportation of laboratory techniques to the field in twentieth-century ecology (and later ecosystems ecology and earth-systems science); and the cartographic revolution launched by satellite and remote-sensing technologies. The purpose of the chapter is therefore to trace some of the more general transformations in the settings of scientific practices, pairing the rise of the laboratory and modern observatory with broadly changing geographic fields of vision.

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