Seas of Data; or, The Oceanographer in the Archive

ABSTRACT:This paper examines the network of media, institutions, and actors that helped create the sea as an epistemic object in nineteenth-century US naval administration. Based on paper technologies such as lists, tables, and logbooks, early oceanography was essentially an archival practice and data processing. In contrast to pelagic histories of the “oceanic turn,” this paper argues that oceanography developed as a science of the archive. It challenges a focus on geographic features in earlier analyses by showing that the ocean of oceanography is not only a body of water between areas of land but also a data space that transcends the boundary between land and sea.