On this page you will find project components made in preparation for a presentation to the Northeast Victorian Studies Association's (NVSA) 2013 meeting, held in April at Boston University. The conference theme was "1874". My presentation attempted to rethink the implications of the debate between Richard Proctor and George Biddel Airy over data-gathering procedures in the 1874 transit of venus. Airy's hierarchical, militaristic approach has been critiqued for the fragility of its communications networks (Bernard Lightman has a great lecture on the subject). I argue that this militaristic structure is precisely what gave the expeditionary teams latitude to (sometimes violently) improvise at their remote sites in order to guarantee accurate measurements. At the different sites, we see a variety of different methods deployed in order to overcome local idiosyncrasies and "connect" isolated sites to the Greenwich observatory.

To the right, find:

• A YouTube video of the narrated powerpoint (with animations starting at 8:40).

• My Google Earth rendering of Airy's 1881 report on the 1874 transit observations (book viewable here). Lines designate communication between observatory sites (white=telegraph, yellow=chronometer, pink=audio/visual [usually gunpowder flares]). Markers designate the observatories. Click on these markers to read excerpts from Airy's final document.

Note:
Only the YouTube video will work on smartphones or tablets.
The embedded map is best viewed using the Google Earth desktop application, and you can download my map file here

Presentation made at NVSA 2013.
Jump to 8:40 for a narrativization of the map.