In her introduction to Science in the Archives (2017), Lorraine Daston explores the way that scientific archives function as “repository” of scientific empiricism (10), a process through which scientists preserve scientific findings. What is occluded in this understanding, Daston explains, is that, when scientists ‘convert’ the natural world into its ‘second nature’—i.e. data—the conditions for that translation are controlled, selective, entangled, slowed, sped up, and digitized (10). Daston’s research helps us to consider how science arbitrarily constructs archivable data at an increasing rate: “more people are manipulating more information in more ways, and all at a tempo that baffles ‘what next?’ predictions” (10). One of the fundamental assumptions of Daston’s argument is that archives both evolve over time and localize important considerations of how research is conducted and maintained: “New hypotheses create new archives” (16).

In line with this year’s MMLA After the Archive theme, the Science and Fiction permanent panel seeks presentations exploring the archive as a ‘temporal repository,’ a concept that connects to the past, present, and future research and into the world around us. As Daston rightly assumes, the archive’s temporality helps us to (re)consider how the archive relates to the past, present, and future while also encouraging a scrutiny of the “acquisition, retrieval, reconfiguration, and transcription” (18) of data. For this year’s panel, we’re interested in the ways that science, scientific cultures, and science fiction relate to the archive’s temporality, including its discursive representations and real-world implications.

As inspired by Datson’s research, we’re inclusive in our understanding of this call. We welcome research interested in exploring how archives exist as a concept, relate to time, involve the preservation of data, and help us understand the fidelity and verisimilitude of history/reality. Other considerations could include the use of fictional narratives to scrutinize scientific empiricism and its arrival work (e.g. the Library in Matheson’s I am Legend), exploring environmental activism and ecological archives (e.g. Carson’s Silent Spring and Earth as Archive), the potential for when an archive is lost (the many-century destruction of the Library of Alexandria), or the way that future scientific advancement may impact archive permanence (e.g. digitization projects, data storage access, data permanence problems, and the role of virtual/automated curators).

Please consider the following potential topics as inspirational and generative:

Discourse as Archive: Technical Writing and Writing as a Memory Tool
Science Fiction’s Lost Archives, The Dark Forest, and Advanced Civilizations
The Body as DNA Archive in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus
The Future of Archival Research: Augmented and Virtual Reality in Ready Player One
The Halo Story Bible as Archive
Insuring the Future: The Millennium Seed Bank as Apocalyptic Archive
Limiting the Past: EEBO and the Digitizing of Early Modern Texts
Right of Access: PubMed, the Archive, and Citizen Science
The Future of an Archive: Cloud Storage and the Problems of Privatization

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For additional questions, please reach out to Jeffrey Squires squires@cmu.edu