Vidéo de la conférence de Matthew Battles (Harvard University)

16 avril 2019

Matthew Battles (Harvard University) fit une conférence intitulée « Earth Measurer: Biodiversity, Affect, and Technology in the Midst of Mass Extinction »

Resource list for « Earth Measurer, » prepared by Matthew Battles

  • William James, 2012 (1909). A Pluralistic Universe: the Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present State of Philosophy, page 148. Floating Press;  Google Books edition accessed 20 September, 2018.
  • The Catalogue of Life: an online meta-database, covering a vast archipelago of taxonomic knowledge emerging from across the biological sciences. A fascinating, ever-changing documental enterprise, it may be browsed via its public interface.
  • Vladimir Nabokov: His poem « On Discovering a Butterfly » first appeared in The New Yorker (May 15, 1943); a serviceable study (and revisionary reappraisal) of Nabokov’s scientific work is Johnson, K., & Coates, S. (1999), Nabokov’s blues: The scientific odyssey of a literary genius (Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books); Blackwell, S., & Johnson, K. (2016), Fine Lines: Vladimir Nabokov’s Scientific Art (New Haven: Yale University Press), beautifully documents Nabokov’s illustration output. Most of Nabokov’s scientific illustrations are held, with his literary archive, in the Berg Collection of American Literature in the New York Public Library.
  • I wrote about the crafts and rites of specimen-making in museums in the online journal Aeon in 2013 (the article includes a mention of yet another moth-technology connection, the misinterpreted « first actual computer bug »).
  • Insect Abundance: Growing concern regarding the loss in abundance of insects has been reported widely in the English-language press, with the Brooke Jarvis’s story, « The Insect Apocalypse is here, in The New York Times (November 27, 2018), garnering much attention. The two studies I reference in my presentation are as follows
  • Lister B, Garcia A (2018) Climate-driven declines in arthropod abundance restructure a rainforest food web. PNAS October 30, 2018 115 (44) E10397-E10406; first published October 15, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1722477115.
  • Hallmann CA, Sorg M, Jongejans E, Siepel H, Hofland N, Schwan H, et al. (2017) More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas. PLoS ONE 12(10): e0185809. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185809.
  • Neural Networks: The python script I use in this project, a recurrent neural network (RNN), was written by Andre Karpathy. A link to the Github repo for this software may be found in Karpathy’s blog post, « The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks, » which also provides a useful introduction to the underlying computer science.
  • Insects and Technics: See Parikka, Jussi (2010), Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) for a rich and provocative discussion of the entangled cultural history of technics and  insects (and other invertebrates).
  • The insect sound work that I mentioned: Lee Mingwei, A Small Conversation. Sound installation, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2017.
  • The winter moth: (Operophtera brumata), the University of Massachusetts Extension Service publishes an extensive page on the species’ ecology and environmental history in North America.
  • W. S. Merwin: his poem, « On Learning a Dead Language, » first appeared in Merwin, W. S. (1956), Green with beasts (London: Hart-Davis).

Ce contenu a été mis à jour le 2 juin 2019 à 13 h 16 min.