Before the Two Cultures: Big Science and Big Humanities in the Nineteenth Century

Big Science and Big Humanities were both born in the nineteenth century. Long before science and humanities became the ‘Two Cultures’, both undertook similarly vast projects to amass the archives of the future. Two of the most ambitious of these projects, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum of the classical philologists and the Carte du Ciel of the astronomers, stretched over decades and continents. Their origins and history show how the sciences of the archives share aims and practices that challenge the current divisions in the classification of knowledge. The sciences of the archives are those disciplines among both the human and the natural sciences that depend on collections of data and objects in order to pursue research in the present and ensure the possibility of research in the future. The type specimens enshrined by botanists, the core samples drilled by geologists, the ancient observations still referred to by astronomers, the data banks assembled by geneticists, the museum collections that hold the corpora cherished by art historians and archaeologists, the case histories published in medical journals, the weather diaries and ships’ logs trawled by climate scientists, and of course the libraries and archives visited by historians - these are the sorts of collections that define the sciences of the archives. In the early twenty-first-century rage for Big Data, we have once again entered an archival epoch in the sciences and humanities. But we have been there before, and there are perhaps some lessons to be learned from the first age of Big Science and Big Humanities.