Turkel - Spark from the deep: how shocking experiments with strongly electric fish powered scientific discovery

Spark from the Deep

ANIMALS, HISTORY, CULTURE
Harriet Ritvo, Series Editor

How Shocking Experiments with
Strongly Electric Fish Powered Scientific Discovery

WILLIAM J. TURKEL

2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2013
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Turkel, William J. (William Joseph), 1967

Spark from the deep : how shocking experiments with strongly electric fish powered scientific

discovery / by William J. Turkel.

pages cm (Animals, history, culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4214-0981-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4214-0994-8 (electronic)
ISBN 1-4214-0981-X (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 1-4214-0994-1 (electronic)

1. Electric fishes. 2. ElectricityExperimentsHistory. 3. Discoveries in sciencesHistory.

I. Title.

QL639.1. T87 2013

597dc23 2012038726

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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For Juliet,
and in memory of Mark Edwin Sitton, 19741998

The impetus for this book came from a graduate seminar that I took in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997. We were watching a film demonstrating Hubel and Wiesels orientation-selectivity experiments. On the screen, a greenish-white bar turns on and off and rotates against a dark background. As it does so, a static noise becomes more or less pronounced. The film shows the stimulus being presented to an anesthetized cat while microelectrodes in its visual cortex audify its neuronal response. I was struck by the contrast between the banality of the images and sounds in the film and the wonder and horror of the activities that were required to create it in the first place. I decided I would rather be studying science as an activity than doing experiments; this book is my attempt to explain the origins and wider significance of electrophysiological experimentation.

As with my first book, this one would not exist if Harriet Ritvo had not read a messy collection of desultory notes and then captured what the whole thing could become in one brilliant, incisive phrase. She remains the best friend and mentor anyone could ever hope to have. My thinking was also shaped during many conversations with other close friends: Edward Jones-Imhotep on the history of electronics and the methodology of science, technology, and society; Rob MacDougall on big history and the history of technology; Tim Hitchcock on computational methods and new ways of doing history; Kevin Kee on the method; and Devon Elliott on just about everything.

While I was writing this book, it was known only as my super-secret monograph. Most historians talk about the content of their projects and keep their methods to themselves. As an experiment, I decided to try doing the opposite. I refused to tell anyone what the book was about, but I shared my methods for researching and writing it. My thanks to all of the people who discussed the method with me in detail, and in some cases enthusiastically adopted parts of it: Torang Asadi, Chad Black, Dan Chudnov, Jim Clifford, Dan Cohen, Matt Connelly, John Fink, Marcel Fortin, Christopher D. Green, Mark Guertin, Steven High, Alan MacEachern, Eden Medina, Ian Milligan, Carolyn Podruchny, Matt Price, Matt Ratto, Elena Razlogova, Spencer Roberts, Geoffrey Rockwell, Jonathan Shaw, Bob Shoemaker, Stfan Sinclair and Nathanael Smith. I hope they like the book, even though it doesnt come with a decoder ring after all.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to my students, colleagues, and teachers. While I was writing, I did reading courses on the history of the life sciences with Drew Davis and Michael Del Vecchio. Mikkel Harris tracked down and digitized obscure journal articles for me. Students in my big history course provided an abundance of enthusiasm and some thought-provoking questions. Colleagues at Concordia, York, and McMaster Universities, the University of Toronto, Code4Lib North, the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative at Columbia University, and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, BC, all discussed methods with me. Eric Fortune kindly e-mailed me about the bizarre adventures that happen in lowland forests while doing field work with electric fish.

Librarians are more important than ever in the age of digital resources: thanks to Liz Mantz and David Fiander at Western Libraries, and Marcel Fortin and Janina Mueller at the University of Toronto Libraries. Janina digitized all of the illustrations for the book. My editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press, Bob Brugger, and the reviewer for the press, J. R. McNeill, both provided excellent feedback for improving the manuscript, as did Glenn Perkins, the copy editor.

I first started learning about many of the topics in this book long before I decided to become a historian. At the University of British Columbia, Don M. Wilkie and Lawrence M. Ward taught me animal and human sensation, perception and cognition, respectively. At MIT, my SM supervisor, Steven Pinker, introduced me to a range of contemporary debates in evolutionary theory.

Big histories are necessarily based on the published work of others. Some historians make a point of fetishizing primary source research, but I have always felt like that signals a remarkable lack of trust in the abilities of our colleagues. If I cant rely on the work of a native speaker who immersed him or herself in a particular archival record for a lifetime, why should I think my own brief foray into unfamiliar territory would be epistemologically more secure? My debt to other authors should be clear from my citations, but a few deserve special mention: Mary A. B. Brazier, David Christian, Andy Clark, Stanley Finger, Leslie A. Geddes, Anita Guerrini, John L. Heilbron, Hebbel E. Hoff, Kevin N. Laland, Peter Moller, Iwan Rhys Morus, Laura Otis, Marco Piccolino, Simon Schaffer, and Kathlyn M. Stewart.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada did not fund this book directly, but I am very grateful for their generous support for the hardware, software, and methodological research that made it possible. I am also grateful for support from the J. B. Smallman Publication Fund, and the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Western Ontario.

As with everything else, humanism has the potential to be practiced very differently in an electric world. This book was written entirely from digital sources, supported by a variety of computational techniques. These included automated searching, spidering, and concordancing, text mining (especially clustering), and machine learning. When sources were not already available in digital form, I digitized them myself or had them digitized before use. Many of the programs that I worked with are commercially available; when suitable software did not already exist, I wrote my own code in Mathematica. My notes on the method, which continues to evolve, are online at http://williamjturkel.net/how-to/ .