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Visualization in the
Age of Computerization

Digitalization and computerization are now pervasive in science. This has

deep consequences for our understanding of scientific knowledge and of the
scientific process, and challenges longstanding assumptions and traditional
frameworks of thinking of scientific knowledge. Digital media and compu-
tational processes challenge our conception of the way in which perception
and cognition work in science, of the objectivity of science, and the nature
of scientific objects. They bring about new relationships between science,
art and other visual media, and new ways of practicing science and orga-
nizing scientific work, especially as new visual media are being adopted by
science studies scholars in their own practice. This volume reflects on how
scientists use images in the computerization age, and how digital technolo-
gies are affecting the study of science.

Annamaria Carusi is Associate Professor in Philosophy of Medical Science

and Technology at the University of Copenhagen.

Aud Sissel Hoel is Associate Professor in Visual Communication at the

Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Timothy Webmoor is Assistant Professor adjunct in the Department of

Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder.

Steve Woolgar is Chair of Marketing and Head of Science and Technology

Studies at Said Business School, University of Oxford.
Routledge Studies in Science, Technology and Society

1 Science and the Media 8 Science Images and Popular

Alternative Routes in Scienti¿c Images of Science
Communication Edited by Bernd Hüppauf and
Massimiano Bucchi Peter Weingart

2 Animals, Disease and Human 9 Wind Power and Power Politics

Society International Perspectives
Human-Animal Relations and the Edited by Peter A. Strachan,
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Joanna Swabe
10 Global Public Health Vigilance
3 Transnational Environmental Creating a World on Alert
Policy Lorna Weir and Eric Mykhalovskiy
The Ozone Layer
Reiner Grundmann 11 Rethinking Disability
Bodies, Senses, and Things
4 Biology and Political Science Michael Schillmeier
Robert H. Blank and Samuel M.
Hines, Jr. 12 Biometrics
Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics
5 Technoculture and Critical Joseph Pugliese
Theory
In the Service of the Machine? 13 Wired and Mobilizing
Simon Cooper Social Movements, New
Technology, and Electoral Politics
6 Biomedicine as Culture Victoria Carty
Instrumental Practices,
Technoscienti¿c Knowledge, and 14 The Politics of Bioethics
New Modes of Life Alan Petersen
Edited by Regula Valérie Burri
and Joseph Dumit 15 The Culture of Science
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Science Communication between Edited by Martin W. Bauer, Rajesh
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16 Internet and Surveillance 25 Information Communication
The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Technology and Social
Social Media Transformation
Edited by Christian Fuchs, Kees A Social and Historical
Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund Perspective
and Marisol Sandoval Hugh F. Cline

17 The Good Life in a Technological 26 Visualization in the Age of

Age Computerization
Edited by Philip Brey, Adam Edited by Annamaria Carusi, Aud
Briggle and Edward Spence Sissel Hoel, Timothy Webmoor and
Steve Woolgar
18 The Social Life of
Nanotechnology
Edited by Barbara Herr Harthorn
and John W. Mohr

19 Video Surveillance and Social

Control in a Comparative
Perspective
Edited by Fredrika Björklund and
Ola Svenonius

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American Identity
C. Waite

21 Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima

Daiichi
Social, Political and
Environmental Issues
Edited by Richard Hindmarsh

22 Internet and Emotions

Edited by Tova Benski and Eran
Fisher

23 Critique, Social Media and the

Information Society
Edited by Christian Fuchs and
Marisol Sandoval

24 Commodi¿ed Bodies
Organ Transplantation and the
Organ Trade
Oliver Decker
This page intentionally left blank
Visualization in the
Age of Computerization

Edited by
Annamaria Carusi, Aud Sissel Hoel,
Timothy Webmoor and Steve Woolgar

NEW YORK LONDON

First published 2015
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
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material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Visualization in the age of computerization / edited by Annamaria Carusi,
Aud Sissel Hoel, Timothy Webmoor and Steve Woolgar.
pages cm. — (Routledge studies in science, technology and society
; 26)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Information visualization. 2. Digital images. 3. Visualization.
4. Computers and civilization. I. Carusi, Annamaria.
QA76.9.I52V574 2014
303.48'34—dc23
2013051326
ISBN13: 978-0-415-81445-4 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-06697-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.

SFI-01234
SFI label applies to the text stock
Contents

List of Figures

Introduction 1
ANNAMARIA CARUSI, AUD SISSEL HOEL,
TIMOTHY WEBMOOR AND STEVE WOOLGAR

PART I
Visualization in the Age of Computerization

1 Algorithmic Alchemy, or the Work of Code

in the Age of Computerized Visualization 19
TIMOTHY WEBMOOR

2 From Spade-Work to Screen-Work:

New Forms of Archaeological Discovery in Digital Space 40
MATT EDGEWORTH

3 British Columbia Mapped: Geology, Indigeneity

and Land in the Age of Digital Cartography 59
TOM SCHILLING

4 Redistributing Representational Work:

Tracing a Material Multidisciplinary Link 77
DAVID RIBES

5 Making the Strange Familiar:

Nanotechnology Images and Their Imagined Futures 97
MICHAEL LYNCH AND KATHRYN DE RIDDER-VIGNONE
viii Contents
6 Objectivity and Representative Practices
across Artistic and Scientific Visualization 118
CHIARA AMBROSIO

7 Brains, Windows and Coordinate Systems 145

ANNAMARIA CARUSI AND AUD SISSEL HOEL

8 A Four-Dimensional Cinema: Computer Graphics,

Higher Dimensions and the Geometrical Imagination 170
ALMA STEINGART

PART II
Doing Visual Work in Science Studies

9 Visual STS 197

PETER GALISON

10 Expanding the Visual Registers of STS 226

TORBEN ELGAARD JENSEN, ANDERS KRISTIAN MUNK,
ANDERS KOED MADSEN AND ANDREAS BIRKBAK

11 Mapping Networks:
Learning From the Epistemology of the “Natives” 231
ALBENA YANEVA

12 Visual STS Is the Answer, What Is the Question? 237

ANNE BEAULIEU

13 Visual Science Studies: Always Already Materialist 243

LISA CARTWRIGHT

Contributors 269
Index 273
Figures

1.1 Lines of code in the programming language C++ (on right)

rendering the visualization (on left) of a London transport
model. 21
1.2 Cached MySQL database. 28
2.1 The use of iPads at Pompeii excavations, 2010. 46
4.1 Two examples of Marie’s work in the application of texture-
mapping to a single surface. Which is more effective? 80
4.2 A texture-map used in one of Marie’s experimental systems. 84
5.1 “Quantum Corral” (1993). 103
5.2 Nanocar models and STM image. 110
6.1 Bernard Siegfried Albinus. 124
6.2 Bernard Siegfried Albinus. 125
6.3 Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907. 132
6.4 Martin John Callanan, 2009. 135
8.1 On the left (1a) is a still from Banchoff and Strauss’s fi rst
film, showing a projection of the flat torus into three-space,
which divides the space into two congruent halves. On the
right (1b) is a later rendering of the same projection with
color and shading. 175
8.2 On the top (2a & 2b) are two images from The Hypercube
Projections and Slicing. Below (2c & 2d) are two images
from Complex Functions Graph. 177
8.3 Two versions of the Veronese surface. 180
9.1 Still from Primate. 207
9.2 Dimitri Mugianis. 209
9.3 Still from Leviathan. 210
9.4 Still from Secrecy. 216
11.1 The dynamic network mapping of the process of design
and construction of the 2012 London Olympics Stadium. 235
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction
Annamaria Carusi, Aud Sissel Hoel,
Timothy Webmoor and Steve Woolgar

The pervasive computerization of imaging and visualizing challenges us to

question what changes accompany computerized imagery and whether, for
instance, it is poised to transform science and society as thoroughly as the
printing press and engraving techniques changed image reproduction (Eisen-
stein 1980; Rudwick 1976), or as radically as photography altered the con-
ditions of human sense perception and the aura of works of art (Benjamin
[1936] 1999). Whereas some scholars discern continuity in representational
form from Renaissance single-point perspective to cinematic and digital
arrays, from Alberti’s windows to Microsoft (Crary 1990; Manovich 2001;
Friedberg 2006; Daston and Galison 2007), other scholars understand our
immersion in imagery as heralding a “visual turn” with the engagement of
knowledge in contemporary culture (Rheingold 1992; Mitchell 1994; Staf-
ford 1996). James Elkins suggests that visual literacy spans the specialized
disciplines of the academy (Elkins 2007), while Robert Horn or Thomas
West claim that “visual thinking” is primary and intuitive (Horn 1998;
West 2004). Computational high-tech may be enabling the reclamation of
old visual talents devalued by word-bound modernist thought.
When we organized the Visualization in the Age of Computerization
conference in Oxford in 2011, we were motivated by curiosity regarding
what specific effects these innovations were having and whether claims
regarding new and more effective visualizing techniques and transformed
modes of visual thinking were being borne out. A further motivation was
the conviction that the exploration of the field would be enriched by input
from the broad range of science studies, including sociological, philosophi-
cal, historical and visual studies approaches. The papers presented at the
conference and the further discussion and debate that they engendered
have gone some way in providing a set of crossdisciplinary and sometimes
interdisciplinary perspectives on the ways in which the field of visualiza-
tion has continued to unfold. This volume gathers together a sample of
contributions from the conference, with others being presented in the
special issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, titled “Computational
Picturing.”1 Other interventions at the conference have been published else-
where, and since that time, the domain has garnered the interest of a great
2 Carusi, Sissel Hoel, Webmoor and Woolgar
many scholars across the disciplines. New publications in the area include
Bartscherer and Coover (2011), Yaneva (2012), Wouters et al. (2013) and
Coopmans et al. (2014). The texts gathered in this volume each address the
ways in which the increasing prevalence of computational means of imag-
ing and visualizing is having an impact on practices and understandings of
“making visible,” as well as of the objects visualized. We note five overlap-
ping themes in considerations of the ways in which the modes of visualiza-
tion associated with digital methods are making a difference in areas that
have traditionally been of interest to studies of the visual in science.
First, a difference is being made to the deployment of perception and
cognition in visual evidence. Traditional ideas about cognition have long
been rejected in favor of an understanding of interpretation in terms of
in situ material practices. It is thus recognized that mentalistic precepts
such as “recognizing patterns,” “identifying relationships,” “assessing fit
and correspondence,” etc. are better treated as idealized depictions of the
activities involved in generating, managing and dealing with representa-
tions. In science and technology studies (STS), visual studies, history of
science and related disciplines, the focus on material practices resulted
in a widespread acknowledgment of the muddled and contingent efforts
involved in the practical activities of making sense of the visual culture
of science (Lynch and Woolgar 1990; Cartwright 1995; Galison 1997).
Yet the advent of new modes of computerized visualization has seen the
reemergence of a mentalistic cognitivism, with visualizations assigned
the role of “cognitive aids” (Bederson and Schneiderman 2003; Card,
Mackinley and Schneiderman 1999; McCormick, DeFanti and Brown
1987; Ware 2000; see Arias-Hernandez, Green and Fisher 2012 for a
review). However, alongside the reemerging cognitivist discourse, there
are other claims that accentuate the cognitive import of visualizations—
that is, their active role in forming and shaping cognition—while simulta-
neously pointing to the complex embedding of perception and cognition
in material settings (Ellenbogen 2008; Carusi 2008; Hoel 2012). As Anne
Beaulieu points out in her contribution toward the end of this volume,
even if the term “visual” relies on the perceptual category of sight, vision
is networked and witnessed by way of computational tools that take
primarily nonoptical forms. Lisa Cartwright too calls attention to the
“always already” material aspects of the visible, pointing out the extent to
which a materialist philosophy has been developed in feminist approaches
to images, imaging and visualization. The cognitive import of visualiza-
tions is emphasized in the chapter by Matt Edgeworth in his discussion
of discovery through screen-work in archaeology, and in the chapter by
Tom Schilling in the context of antagonistic communities using maps
or data sets as visual arguments. Alma Steingart, likewise, underscores
the cognitive import of visualizations by tracking the way that computer
graphics animations were put to use by mathematicians as generative of
novel theories. In fact, most contributions to this volume lay stress upon
 Introduction 3
the cognitive import of visualizations, by pointing to their transformative
and performative roles in vision and knowledge.
A second change is in the understanding of objectivity in the method-
ological sense of what counts as an objective scientific claim. Shifts in obser-
vational practice are related to fluctuations as to what counts as “good”
vision with respect to the type of vision that is believed to deliver objectivity.
However, there are diverse notions of objectivity in the domain mediated
by computational visualization. Scholars have described the involvement
of technologies in science in terms of the historical flux of epistemic vir-
tues in science, tracing a trajectory from idealized images that required
intervention and specialized craftsmanship to more mechanical forms of
recording. A later hybridization of these virtues has been claimed to occur
when instruments and, later, computers allowed active manipulation versus
passive observation (Hacking 1983; Galison 1997). Other researchers sug-
gest that the computerization of images accounts for an epistemic devalu-
ation of visualizations in favor of their mathematical manipulation that
the digital (binary) format allows (Beaulieu 2001). This raises questions
of objectivity in science, but not without also raising questions about the
objects that are perceived through different modes of visualization (Hoel
2011; Carusi 2012). In this volume, Chiara Ambrosio shows that notions of
scientific objectivity have been shaped in a constant dialogue with artistic
representation. She points to the importance of contextualizing prevalent
ideas of truth in science by attending to the roles of artists in shaping these
ideas as well as challenging them. Annamaria Carusi and Aud Sissel Hoel
develop an approach to visualizations in neuroscience that accentuates
the generative dimension of vision, developing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
notion of “system of equivalences” as an alternative to approaches in terms
of subjectivity or objectivity. The generative roles of visualizations, or,
more precisely, of digital mapping practices, are also emphasized in Albena
Yaneva’s contribution, as well as in the contribution by Torben Elgaard Jen-
sen, Anders Kristian Munk, Anders Koed Madsen and Andreas Birkbak.
A third area where we are seeing shifts is in the ontology of what counts
as a scientific object. The notion of what constitutes a scientific object has
received a great deal of attention for quite some time in science studies
broadly (philosophy, history and sociology). However, we are currently see-
ing a resurgence of interest in the ontology of scientific objects (Barad 2007;
Bennett 2010; Brown 2003; Harman 2009; Latour 2005; Olsen et al. 2012;
Woolgar and Lezaun 2013; among many others; see Trentmann 2009 for
an overview). As Cartwright points out in her chapter, a new preoccupation
with ontology in science studies has been continuous with the digitaliza-
tion of medicine, science and publication. It may seem that this is because
computational objects demand a different sort of ontology: They are often
seen as virtual as opposed to physical objects, and their features are often
seen as in some sense secondary to the features of “actual” physical objects
that they are assumed to mimic. However, the distinction between virtual
4 Carusi, Sissel Hoel, Webmoor and Woolgar
and physical objects is problematic (Rogers 2009; Carusi 2011; Hoel and
van der Tuin 2013), and is inadequate to the working objects handled and
investigated by the sciences. This is highlighted when attention is paid to
the mode of visualization implied by digitalization and computerization. In
this volume, Timothy Webmoor observes that the formerly distinct steps of
crafting visualizations are woven together through the relational ontology
of “codework.” A relational ontology is also key to the approach developed
by Carusi and Hoel, as it is to other contributions that emphasize the gen-
erative aspect of visualizations. Steingart, for example, points out that the
events portrayed in the mathematical films she has studied are not indexes of
observable natural events, but events that become phenomena at all only to
the extent that they are graphically represented and animated. However, the
ontological implications of visualization are frequently obscured: Michael
Lynch and Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone, in their study of nanotechnology
images, note that by resorting to visual analogies and artistic conventions
for naturalistic portrayal of objects and scenery, nano-images represent a
missed opportunity to challenge conventional, naturalistic ontology.
In terms of the ontology of visual matter, some visual culturalists and
anthropologists (e.g., Gell 1998; Pinney 1990, 2004) have suggested that tak-
ing ontology seriously entails reorienting our epistemic toolbox for explain-
ing images, or suspending our desire for epistemic explanation. These include
“scaling-out” strategies that move away from the visual object to emphasize
historical contingency, partiality or construction through documenting an
object’s many sociotechnical relationships. A different mode of engagement
may be localizing at the scale of the visual object to get at the “otherness,”
“fetishization” and inherent qualities that make certain visual imagery work
(Harman 2011; Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007; Pinney 1990; Webmoor
2013; topics also discussed by Beaulieu in this volume). Deploying media to
register ontological competencies, rather than to serve epistemic goals, means
developing object-oriented metrologies, or new methods of “measuring”
materiality (Webmoor 2014). This tactic would in part strive for the affective
appreciation of visual objects, and it may approximate the collaboratively
produced imagery of artists and scientists. Hence, we view the increase in
collaborations between science and art, or alternatively, between science/
visual studies and art, as a fourth area of change. Certainly, as has been well
documented, there is a long history of productive interchange between scien-
tists and artists (Stafford 1991; Jones and Galison 1998; Kemp 2006). Fur-
ther, the introduction of digital and computational technologies has opened
a burgeoning field of explorations into embodied experience and technology,
challenging boundaries between technoscience, activism and contemporary
art (Jones 2006; da Costa and Philip 2008). In fact, one of the things that we
were aiming for with the conference was to encourage interdisciplinary dia-
logue and debate between different approaches to science and image studies,
and particularly to get more conversations and collaborations going between
STS and the humanities, as well as between science/visual studies and creative
 Introduction 5
practitioners. To attain the second goal, artists and designers, including Ali-
son Munro, Gordana Novakovic and Alan Blackwell, were invited to present
their work at the conference. In this volume, relations between science and
art are dealt with by several contributors. Ambrosio discusses three histori-
cal and contemporary examples, where science has crossed paths with art,
arguing that an adequate understanding of the shifting notions of objectiv-
ity requires taking into account the variegated influences of art. Carusi and
Hoel show the extent to which a scientific practice such as neuroimaging
shares characteristics of the process of painting, while David Ribes shows
how today’s visualization researchers apply insights from visual perception
and artistic techniques to design in order to ensure a more efficient visualiza-
tion of data. The chapter by Lynch and de Ridder-Vignone also testifies to the
interplay of science and art, not only through the reliance of nano-images on
established artistic conventions, but also due to the way that nano-images are
often produced and displayed as art, circulated through online “galleries.”
A fifth change relates to the way that computational tools bring about
modifications to practice, both in settings where visualizations are devel-
oped and used in research, and in settings where scholars study these visu-
alizing practices. A series of studies have documented the manner in which
visually inscribing phenomena makes up “the everyday” of science work
(Latour and Woolgar 1979; Lynch and Woolgar 1990; Cartwright 1995;
Galison 1997; Knuuttila, Merz and Mattila 2006), suggesting that much
of what enables science to function is making things visible through the
assembling of inscriptions for strategic purposes. However, whereas previ-
ously researchers investigating these visual inscription processes made their
observations in “wet-labs” or physical sites of production, today they often
confront visualizations assembled entirely in the computer or in web-based
“spaces” (Merz 2006; Neuhaus and Webmoor 2012). Several contributors
explore how tasks with computational tools of visualization are reconfigur-
ing organizational and management practices in research settings. Ribes,
focusing on visualization researchers who both publish research fi ndings
and develop visualization software, shows how, through visual input, tech-
nology takes on a leading role in sustaining collaborations across disci-
plines, which no longer depend solely on human-to-human links. Webmoor
ethnographically documents changes to the political economy of academia
that are attendant with the cocreation of data, code and visual outputs by
researchers, software programmers and lab directors. He poses this reflexive
question: What changes for academics in terms of promotion, assignation
of publishing credit and determination of “impact factors” will accompany
the increasing online publishing of research outputs, or visualizations, in
digital format? Modifications to practice due to new computational tools
is also a key topic in Edgeworth’s chapter, which tracks the transition from
spade-work to screen-work in archaeology, as it is in Schilling’s chapter,
which points to the blurring of boundaries between producers and users in
today’s mapmaking practices.
6 Carusi, Sissel Hoel, Webmoor and Woolgar
When it comes to the modifications to the second setting, to the way that
today’s scholars go about investigating the practices of science, Peter Gali-
son’s contribution to this volume challenges scholars to do visual work and
not only to study it. Galison’s chapter, however, is of a different kind than
the preceding chapters, being set up as a debate contribution advocating film
as a research tool in science and technology studies—or what he refers to
as “second-order visual STS.” Upon receiving this contribution, we had the
idea of inviting scholars of the visual culture of science to respond, or alter-
natively, to write up their own position pieces on the topic of visual STS.
Thus, whereas the first part of the book consists of a series of (in Galison’s
terms) first-order VSTS contributions, the second part consists of a series
of debate contributions (varying in length from short pieces to full length
papers) that discuss the idea of visual STS, and with that, the idea of doing
visual work in science studies (second-order VSTS). This was particularly
appropriate since, as the book was being fi nalized, we noted that the call for
submissions for the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies
of Science included a request for “sessions and papers using ‘new media’ or
other forms of new presentation,” and that there would be “special sessions
on movies and videos where the main item submitted will be a movie or
video.”2 This initiative has been followed up by the announcement of a new
annual film festival, Ethnografilm, the first of which to be held in Paris, April
2014. The expressed purpose of the film festival is to promote filmmaking
as a “legitimate enterprise for academic credit on a par with peer reviewed
articles and books.”3 Clearly, science/visual studies scholars are themselves
experiencing the challenge of digital technologies to their own research and
presentation practice, and are more than willing to experiment with using
the visual as well as studying it. As many of the contributors to the sec-
ond part of the book discuss, conducting research through filmmaking or
other visual means is not unprecedented—Galison himself discusses visual
anthropology, and Cartwright discusses the use of film by researchers such
as Christina Lammer. However, digital tools make movies and videos avail-
able to a far wider range of scholars (consider Galison’s discussion of the
extremely time-consuming editing process in predigital filming), and also
make other techniques that have been used in the past—such as mapping and
tracing networks—more available. This is not only a question of availability:
Digitalization also transforms these techniques and media, and the mode
of knowledge attained through them, as is clearly seen in the discussion of
mapping in the responses of Jensen et al. and Yaneva. Besides, the increasing
availability of digital video challenges science studies scholars not to fall back
into what Cartwright terms an “anachronistic realism”, but to deploy new
modes of reflexivity in their use of the medium.
With the call for second-order VSTS, and the merging of crafts formerly
divided between the arts and sciences, we note an optimistic potential for
the engagement with visualizations in the age of computerization. With
computerized forms of capture, rendering, distribution and retrieval of
 Introduction 7
scholarly information, the repertoires of science as well as science/visual
studies expand well beyond the historical trajectory of what paper-based
media permit. As several contributors urge, visual media with their unique
affordances supplement paper-based media and allow complementary and
richer portrayals of the practices of science. Further, with this expansion
come new forms of knowledge. Certainly, this volume cannot exhaust a field
already acknowledged for its inventiveness of new tools and techniques,
and is but an initial exploration of some of its central challenges that will
no doubt continue to elicit the attention of science studies scholars. What
we hope to have achieved by gathering together these studies of computer-
ized visualization is that the visual dimension of visualization warrants
attention in its own right, and not only as an appendage of digitalization.

OVERVIEW

The present volume is divided into two parts. The fi rst part consists of eight
chapters that examine the transformative roles of visualizations across dis-
ciplines and research domains. All of these chapters are based on presenta-
tions made at the 2011 conference in Oxford. The second part considers
instead the use of the visual as a medium in science/visual studies, and con-
sists of two full-length chapters and three short position pieces. The con-
tributors to this part were also affiliated with the Oxford conference in one
way or another: as keynote, invited keynote, respondent or participants.
The following paragraphs provide a brief overview of all contributions.
Timothy Webmoor, in his chapter “Algorithmic Alchemy, or the Work
of Code in the Age of Computerized Visualization,” offers an ethnography
of an academic-cum commercial visualization lab in London. Work with
and reliance upon code is integral to computerized visualization. Yet work
with code is like Nigel Thrift’s “technological unconscious” (Thrift 2004).
Until quite recently it has remained in the black boxes of our computerized
devices: integral to our many mundane and scientific pursuits, yet little
understood. Close ethnographic description of how code works suggests
some novelties with respect to the tradition of examining representation in
science and technology studies. Webmoor argues that formerly separated
or often sequential tasks, principally data sourcing, programming and visu-
alizing, are now woven together in what researchers do. This means that
previously separated roles, such as those of researcher and programmer,
increasingly converge in what he terms “codework,” an activity resembling
reiterative knot-making. Outputs or visualizations, particularly with the
“mashed-up” web-based visualizations he studies, are held only provision-
ally like a knot before they are redone, adjusted, updated or taken down.
Nevertheless, codework demonstrates vitality precisely because it con-
founds conventional schemes of accountability and governance. It plays on
a tension between creativity and containment.
8 Carusi, Sissel Hoel, Webmoor and Woolgar
Matt Edgeworth’s “From Spade-Work to Screen-Work: New Forms of
Archaeological Discovery in Digital Space” undertakes an ethnography of
practices in archaeology involving the integration of digital tools. A pre-
sentation of his own intellectual development in terms of deploying digital
tools as an archaeologist parallels and grants a candor to his empirical
observations surrounding changes to a field that is often caricatured as
rather a-technological due to the down-and-dirty conditions of archaeo-
logical fieldwork. Among other new tools of archaeology, Edgeworth
underscores the embodiment and tacit skill involved with imaging tech-
nologies, particularly those of Google Earth and LiDAR satellite images.
He makes the case that screen-work, identifying and interpreting archaeo-
logical features on the computer screen, entails discovery in the quintes-
sential archaeological sense, that of excavating pertinent details from the
“mess” or inundation of visual information. He proceeds to ask whether
these modes of discovery are drastically different, or whether the shift to
digital techniques is a step-wise progression in the adoption of new tools.
In moving the locus of archaeological discovery toward the archaeological
office space, Edgeworth brings up a fundamental issue of identity for “the
discipline of the spade” in the digital age.
In his chapter “British Columbia Mapped: Geology, Indigeneity and
Land in the Age of Digital Cartography,” Tom Schilling offers a detailed
consideration of the practices, processes and implications of digital map-
ping by exploration geologists and Aboriginal First Nations in British
Columbia, Canada. In both cases the communities produce maps that enter
the public domain with explicit imperatives reflecting their economic and
political interests. Exploration geologists use digital mapping tools to shape
economic development, furthering their search for new mineral prospects
in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. First Nations, on their side, produce
digital maps to amplify claims to political sovereignty, by developing data
layers consisting of ethnographic data. The chapter also explores the speci-
ficities of digital cartography compared to its paper-based predecessors.
While both digital and paper-based cartography are invariably political,
digital mapping tools are distinguished by their manipulability: By invit-
ing improvisational reconstruction they challenge the distinction between
producers and users of maps. However, as Schilling’s case studies make
clear, these practices have yet to fulfill the ideals of collaborative sharing of
data and democratic participation. Further, as community-assembled data
sets are taken up by others, the meaning and origins of databases become
increasingly obscured.
The contribution by David Ribes, “Redistributing Representational
Work: Tracing a Material Multidisciplinary Link,” turns our atten-
tion to the way in which scientists’ reliance on visualization software
results in a redistribution of labor in terms of knowledge production,
with computer scientists playing a key intermediary role in the process.
The chapter follows the productive work of one computer scientist as she
 Introduction 9
built visualization tools for the sciences and medicine using techniques
from experimental psychology. He shows that the methods and fi ndings
of the computer scientists have two trajectories: On one hand, they are
documented in scholarly publications, where their strengths and weak-
nesses are discussed; on the other, research outcomes also independently
inform the production of future visualization tools, and become incorpo-
rated into a process of scientific knowledge production in another field.
Ribes explores the gap between these two trajectories, showing that as
visualization software comes to be used and reused in different contexts,
multidisciplinarity is loosened from human-to-human links, and instead
becomes embedded in the technology itself.
Michael Lynch and Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone, in their chapter “Mak-
ing the Strange Familiar: Nanotechnology Images and Their Imagined
Futures,” examine different types of images of nanoscale phenomena.
Images play a prominent role in the multidisciplinary field of nanoscience
and nanotechnology; and to an even greater extent than in other research
areas images are closely bound to the promotion and public interface of
the field. Examining nano-images circulated through online image galler-
ies, press releases and other public forums, Lynch and de Ridder-Vignone
make the observation that, even if they portray techno-scientific futures
that challenge the viewer’s imagination, nano-images resort to classic artis-
tic conventions and naturalistic portrayals in order to make nanoscale phe-
nomena sensible and intelligible—pursuing the strategy of “making the
strange familiar.” This may seem ironic, since the measurements of scan-
ning-tunneling microscopes are not inherently visual, and the nanoscale
is well below the minimum wavelengths of visible light. Nonetheless, the
conventions used take different forms in different contexts, and the chapter
proceeds to undertake an inventory of nano-images that brings out their
distinct modes of presentation and their distinct combinations of imagina-
tion and realism.
With the chapter by Chiara Ambrosio, “Objectivity and Representative
Practices across Artistic and Scientific Visualization,” we turn to the his-
tory of objectivity in art and science, and specifically to the way in which
they are interrelated. She shows that scientific objectivity has constantly
crossed paths with the history of artistic representation, from which it has
received some powerful challenges. Her aim is twofold: fi rstly to show the
way in which artists have crucially contributed to shaping the history of
objectivity; and secondly to challenge philosophical accounts of repre-
sentation that not only are ahistorical but also narrowly focus on science
decontextualized from its conversations with art. Ambrosio’s discussion of
three case studies from eighteenth-century science illustration, nineteenth-
century photography and twenty-fi rst-century data visualization highlight
the importance of placing current computational tools and technologies in
a historical context, which encompasses art and science. She proposes a
historically grounded and pragmatic view of “representative practices,” to
10 Carusi, Sissel Hoel, Webmoor and Woolgar
account for the key boundary areas in which art and science have comple-
mented each other, and will continue to do so in the age of computerization.
Annamaria Carusi and Aud Sissel Hoel, in their chapter “Brains, Win-
dows and Coordinate Systems,” develop an account of neuroimaging that
conceives brain imaging methods as at once formative and revealing of
neurophenomena. Starting with a critical discussion of two metaphors that
are often evoked in the context of neuroimaging, the “window” and the
“view from nowhere,” they propose an approach that goes beyond con-
trasts between transparency and opacity, or between complete and partial
perspectives. Focusing on the way brain images and visualizations are used
to convey the spatiality of the brain, neuroimaging is brought into juxta-
position with painting, which has a long history of grappling with space.
Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of painting in “Eye and Mind,”
where he sets forth an integrated account of vision, images, objects and
space, Carusi and Hoel argue that the handling and understanding of space
in neuroimaging involve the establishment of a “system of equivalences”
in the terms of Merleau-Ponty. Accentuating the generative dimension of
images and visualizations, the notion of seeing according to a system of
equivalences offers a conceptual and analytic tool that opens a new line of
inquiry into scientific vision.
In her chapter “A Four-Dimensional Cinema: Computer Graphics,
Higher Dimensions and the Geometrical Imagination,” Alma Steingart
investigates the way that computer graphic animation has reconfigured
mathematicians’ visual culture and transformed mathematical practice by
providing a new way of engaging with mathematical objects and theories.
Tracking one of the earliest cases in which computer graphics technology
was applied to mathematical work, the films depicting four-dimensional
surfaces by Thomas Banchoff and Charles Strauss, Steingart argues that
computer graphics did more than simply represent mathematical phenom-
ena. By transforming mathematical objects previously known only through
formulas and abstract argument into perceptible events accessible to direct
visual investigation, computer graphic animation became a new way of
producing mathematical knowledge. Computer graphics became a tool for
posing new problems and exploring new solutions, portraying events that
would not be accessible except through their graphic representation and
animation. It became an observational tool that allowed mathematicians
to see higher dimensions, and hence a tool for cultivating and training their
geometrical imagination.
The focus on film as a mode of discovery makes a nice transition to
the next chapter, by Peter Galison, which introduces the second part of
the book. Galison challenges science studies to use the visual as well as
to study it, and delineates the contours of an emerging visual science and
technology studies or VSTS in a contribution with two parts: a theoret-
ical reflection on VSTS, and a description of his own experience doing
science studies through the medium of fi lm, in such projects as Ultimate
 Introduction 11
Weapon: The H-Bomb Dilemma (Hogan 2000) and Secrecy (Galison and
Moss 2008). Galison draws a distinction between fi rst-order VSTS, which
continues to study the uses that scientists make of the visual, and second-
order VSTS, which uses the visual as the medium in which it conducts
and conveys its own research. He proposes that exploring the potential for
second-order VSTS is a logical further development of what he holds up as
the key accomplishment of science studies in the last thirty years: develop-
ing localization as a counter to global claims about universal norms and
transhistorical markers of demarcation.
In their collective piece, “Expanding the Visual Registers of STS,” Tor-
ben Elgaard Jensen, Anders Kristian Munk, Anders Koed Madsen and
Andreas Birkbak respond to Galison’s call to expand the visual research
repertoire by advising an even larger expansion: Why stop at filmmaking
when there are also other visual practices that could be taken up by second-
order VSTS? Focusing in particular on the practice of making digital maps,
they argue that the take-up of maps by second-order VSTS would have to
be accompanied by a conceptual rethinking of maps, including a discussion
of the way maps structure argumentation. They also pick up on Galison’s
observations concerning the affectivity of film and video by suggesting that
maps also leave the viewer affected through his or her own unique mode
of engagement.
In her response, “Mapping Networks: Learning from the Epistemology
of the ‘Natives,’” Albena Yaneva starts out by pointing to the role of eth-
nographic images in shaping the fieldworker’s explanations and arguments.
Further, with the introduction of digital mapping tools into the STS tool
box with large projects such as the controversy mapping collaborative proj-
ect MACOSPOL, a shift to second-order VSTS has already taken place.
Emphasizing the performative force of mapping, Yaneva argues that map-
ping is not a way of illustrating but a way of generating and deploying
knowledge. In her own fieldwork, which followed the everyday visual work
of artists, technicians, curators, architects and urban planners, Yaneva
experimented with swapping tools with the “natives,” learning a lot from
their indigenous visual techniques. Drawing on this “organic” development
of second-order visual methods gained through ethnographic intimacy, she
suggests borrowing epistemologies and methods from the “natives.”
In her piece “If Visual STS Is the Answer, What Is the Question?” Anne
Beaulieu outlines her position on the topic of visual STS. She starts out
by countering claims that STS has always been visual or that attending to
the visual is equal to fetishizing it. Defending the continued relevance of
talking about a “visual turn” in STS, Beaulieu lists five reasons why the
question of VSTS becomes interesting if one attends to its specifics: Images
are an emergent entity that remains in flux; visual practices are just as
boring as other material practices studied by STS; observation takes many
forms and must be learned; vision and images are to an increasing extent
networked; and attending to the visual can serve to expand the toolkit of
12 Carusi, Sissel Hoel, Webmoor and Woolgar
STS by drawing on resources from disciplines such as media studies, fi lm
studies, art history and feminist critiques of visuality.
The concluding contribution to this volume, Lisa Cartwright’s “Visual
Science Studies: Always Already Materialist,” demonstrates the importance
of approaching the visual in an interdisciplinary manner. Cartwright points
out the attention paid to the materiality of the visual that was a hallmark of
Marxist materialist and feminist visual studies from the late 1970s onwards.
The chapter highlights the specific contributions of materialist and feminist
visual studies in addressing subjectivity and embodiment. The focus of visual
studies on materiality does not result in a disavowal of or skepticism toward
the visual. Cartwright reminds us that the visual turn of science studies since
the 1990s coincided with the digital turn in science and technology, includ-
ing the use of digital media in the fieldwork of science studies scholars; here
the author calls for a more reflexive use of the medium. The chapter con-
cludes with a detailed discussion of two films by the sociologist and videogra-
pher Christina Lammer—Hand Movie 1 and 2—showing how they present
a third way, which neither reduces things to their meanings in the visual, nor
reduces images to the things and processes around them; instead, they bring
out a more productive way of handling visuality and materiality.

NOTES

1. Volume 37, Number 1, March 2012. All the contributions published in the
special issue are freely available for download at the following link: http://
www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/isr/2012/00000037/00000001.
Last accessed 4th November, 2013.
2. http://www.4sonline.org/meeting. Last accessed 4th November, 2013.
3. For more information about the fi lm festival, see: http://ethnografi lm.org.
Last accessed 4th November, 2013.

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This page intentionally left blank
Part I

Visualization in the
Age of Computerization
This page intentionally left blank
1 Algorithmic Alchemy, or the
Work of Code in the Age of
Computerized Visualization
Timothy Webmoor

INTRODUCTION

“I’m doing something very dangerous right now” (Informant 1, July

8, 2010).

“Yah, now is not a good time for me!” (Informant 2, July 8, 2010).

Ethnographic silence can speak volumes. Despite prompts from the anthro-
pologist, the dialogue dried up. Falling back on observation, the two infor-
mants were rapidly, if calmly, moving between their multiple program
windows on their multiple computer displays. I had been observing this
customary activity of coding visualizations for nearly a month now—a
visual multitasking that is so characteristic of the post–Microsoft Windows
age (Friedberg 2006). Looking around the open plan office setting, every-
one was huddled in front of a workstation. Unlike ethnographic work in
“wet labs,” where the setting and activities at hand differ from the anthro-
pologist’s own cubicled site of production, this dry lab (Merz 2006) seemed
so mundane and familiar, as a fellow office worker and computer user, that
admittedly I had little idea of how to gain any analytic purchase as their
resident anthropologist. What was interesting about what these researchers
and programmers were doing?
It wasn’t until I had moved on to questioning some of the PhD research-
ers in the cramped backroom that the importance of what the two infor-
mants were doing was overheard: “Well done! So it’s live?” (Director,
July 8, 2010). The two programmers had launched a web-based survey
program, where visitors to the site could create structured questionnaires
for other visitors to answer. The responses would then be compiled for
each visitor and integrated with geo-locational information obtained from
browser-based statistics to display results spatially on a map. It was part
of what this laboratory was well known for: mashing up and visualizing
crowd-sourced and other “open” data. While focused upon the UK, within
a few months the platform had received over 25,000 visitors from around
the world. The interface looked deceptively simple, even comical given a
20 Timothy Webmoor
cartoon giraffe graced the splash page as a mascot of sorts. However, the
reticence the day of its launch was due to the sheer labor of coding to dis-
simulate the complicated operations allowing such an “open” visualization.
“If you’re going to allow the world to ask the rest of the world anything,
it is actually quite complicated” (Director, June 11, 2010). As one of the
programmers later explained his shifting of attention between paper notes,
notes left in the code, and the code itself, “I have to keep abreast of what
I’ve done because an error . . . (pause) . . . altering the back channel infra-
structure goes live on a website” (Informant 1, July 21, 2010).
Being familiar with basic HTML, a type of code or, more precisely, a
markup text often used to render websites, I knew the two programmers
were writing and debugging code that day. Alphanumeric lines, full of sym-
bols and incongruous capitalizations and spacing, were recognizable enough;
at the lab this lingua franca was everywhere apparent and their multiple
screens were full of lines of code. Indeed, there were “1,000 lines just for the
web page view itself [of the web-based survey platform]” (Informant 2, June
6, 2011)—that is, for the window on the screen to correctly size, place and
frame the visualized data. Yet when looking at what they were doing there
was little to see, per se. There was no large image on their screens to anchor
my visual attention—a link between the programming they were engrossed
in and what it was displaying, or, more accurately, the dispersed data the
code was locating, compiling and rendering in the visual register.
The web-based survey and visualization platform was just one of several
visualizing platforms that the laboratory was working on. For other types
of completed visualizations rendering large amounts of data—for example,
a London transport model based upon publicly available data from the
Transport for London (TfL) authority—you might have much more coding:
“This is about 6,000 lines of code, for this visualization [of London traf-
fic]” (Informant 3, June 10, 2011) (Figure 1.1).
Over the course of roughly a year during which I regularly visited the
visualization laboratory in London, I witnessed the process of launching
many such web-based visualizations, some from the initial designing ses-
sions around the whiteboards to the critical launches. A core orientation of
the research lab was a desire to make the increasingly large amounts of data
in digital form accessible to scholars and the interested public. Much infor-
mation has become widely available from government authorities (such as
the TfL) through mandates to make collected digital data publicly available,
for instance, through the 2000 Freedom of Information Act in the UK, or
the 1996 Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments in the US.
Massive quantities are also being generated through our everyday engage-
ments with the Internet. Of course, the tracking of our clicks, “likes,”
visited pages, search keywords, browsing patterns, and even email con-
tent has been exploited by Internet marketing and service companies since
the commercialization of the Internet in the late 1990s (see Neuhaus and
Webmoor 2012 on research with social media). Yet embedded within an
 Algorithmic Alchemy 21

Figure 1.1 Lines of code in the programming language C++ (on right) rendering the
visualization (on left) of a London transport model (Informant 3, June 10, 2011).

academic institution, this laboratory was at the “bleeding edge” of harvest-

ing and visualizing such open databases and other traces left on the Inter-
net for scholarly purposes. Operating in a radically new arena for potential
research, there is a growing discussion in the social sciences and digital
humanities over how to adequately and ethically data mine our “digital
heritage” (Webmoor 2008; Bredl, Hünniger and Jensen 2012; Giglietto,
Rossi and Bennato 2012). Irrespective of what sources of data were being
rendered into the visual register by programmers and researchers at this
lab, I constantly found myself asking for a visual counterpart to their inces-
sant coding: “Can you show me what the code is doing?” I needed to see
what they were up to.

CODEWORK

Code, or specifically working with code as a software programmer, has

often been portrayed as a complicated and arcane activity. Broadly defi ned,
code is “[a]ny system of symbols and rules for expressing information or
instructions in a form usable by a computer or other machine for process-
ing or transmitting information” (OED 2013). Of course, like language,
22 Timothy Webmoor
there are many forms of code: C++, JavaScript, PHP, Python—to name a
few more common ones discussed later. The ability to “speak computer”
confers on programmers a perceived image of possessing inscrutable and
potent abilities to get computers to comply.1 Part nerd, part hero, program-
mers and specifically hacker culture have been celebrated in cyberpunk
literature and cinema for being mysterious and libertarian. 2 The gothic
sensibility informing such portrayals reinforces a darkened and distanced
view of working with code.
The academic study of code, particularly from the science and technol-
ogy studies (STS) perspective of exhibiting what innervates the quintessen-
tial “black boxes” that are our computing devices, has only recently been
pursued ethnographically (e.g., Coleman and Golub 2008; Demazière,
Horn and Zune 2007; Kelty 2008). Oftentimes, however, such studies scale
out from code, from a consideration of its performative role in generat-
ing computerized outputs, to discuss the identity and social practices of
code workers. More closely examining working with code has received
less attention (though see Brooker, Greiffenhagen and Sharrock 2011;
Rooksby, Martin and Rouncefield’s 2006 ethnomethodological study).
Sterne (2003) addresses the absent presence of code and software more
generally in academic work and suggests it is due to the analytic challenge
that code presents. The reasons for this relate to my own ethnographic
encounter. It is boring. It is also nonindexical of visual outputs (as least to
the untrained eye unfamiliar with “reading” code; see Rooksby, Martin
and Rouncefield 2006). In other words, code, like Thrift’s (2004) “tech-
nological unconscious,” tends to recede from immediate attention into
infrastructural systems sustaining and enabling topics and practices of
concern. Adrian Mackenzie, in his excellent study Cutting Code (2006,
2), describes how software is felt to be intangible and immaterial, and for
this reason it is often on the fringe of academic and commercial analyses
of digital media. He is surely right to bemoan not taking code seriously,
downplayed as it is in favor of supposed higher-order gestalt shifts in cul-
ture (“convergence”), political economy (“digital democracy” and “radical
sharing”) and globalization (“network society”). No doubt the “technical
practices of programming interlace with cultural practices” (ibid., 4), with
the shaping and reshaping of sociality, forms of collectivity and ideas of
selfhood; what Manovich (2001, 45) termed “trans-coding” (e.g., Ghosh
2005; Himanen, Torvalds and Castells 2002; Lessig 2004; Weber 2004; for
academic impacts see Bartscherer and Coover 2011). However, these larger
order processes have dominated analyses of the significance involving the
ubiquity of computer code.
Boring and analytically slippery, code is also highly ambiguous. The
Oxford Dictionary of Computing (1996) offers no less than 113 techni-
cal terms that use the word “code” in the domain of computer science and
information technology. So despite acknowledging the question “Why is it
hard to pin down what software is?” (2006, 19), Mackenzie, a sociologist
 Algorithmic Alchemy 23
of science, admirably takes up the summons in his work. For Mackenzie,
code confounds normative concepts in the humanities and social sciences.
It simply does not sit still long enough to be easily assigned to conventional
explanatory categories, to be labeled as object or practice, representation
or signified, agent or effect, process or event. He calls this “the shifting
status of code” (ibid., 18). Mackenzie’s useful approach is to stitch together
code with agency. Based upon Alfred Gell’s (1998) innovative anthropo-
logical analysis of art and agency, Mackenzie (2006, 2005) pursues an
understanding of software and code in terms of its performative capacity.
“Code itself is structured as a distribution of agency” (2006, 19). To string
together what he sees as distributed events involving code’s agency, he takes
up another anthropologist’s methodological injunction to pursue “multi-
sited ethnography” (Marcus 1995). In terms of how code is made to travel,
distributed globally across information and communication technologies
(ICTs) and networked servers as a mutable mobile (cf. Latour 1986), this
approach permits Mackenzie to follow (the action of) code and offer one of
the fi rst non-technical considerations of its importance in the blood flow of
contemporary science, commerce and society.
Given its mobility, mutability, its slippery states, code can usefully be
studied through such network approaches. Yet I am sympathetic with recent
moves within ethnography to reassess the importance of locality and resist
the tendency (post-globalization) to scale out (see Candea 2009; Falzon
2009; in STS see Lynch 1993). While there is of course a vast infrastructural
network that supports the work code performs in terms of the “final” visu-
alizations, which will be discussed with respect to “middle-ware”, most of
the work involving code happens in definite local settings—in this case, in a
mid-sized visualization and research laboratory in central London.
Describing how code works and what it does for the “hackers” of com-
puterized visualizations will help ground the larger order studies of cul-
tural impacts of computerization, as well as complement the more detailed
research into the effects of computerization on scientific practices. I am,
therefore, going to pass over the much studied effects of software in the
workplace (e.g., Flowers 1996; Hughes and Cotterell 2002) and focus upon
when technology is the work (Grint and Woolgar 1997; Hine 2006). Stay-
ing close to code entails unpacking what occurs at the multiple screens
on programmers’ computers. Like a summer holiday spent at home, it is
mundane and a little boring to “stay local,” but like the launch of the new
web-based open survey visualizer that tense day, there are all the same
quite complex operations taking place with code.
With the computerization of data and visualizations, the work with code
weaves together many formerly distinct roles. This workflow wraps together
the practices of: sourcing data to be visualized; programming to trans-
form and render data visually; visualizing as a supposed fi nal stage. I term
these activities “codework.” Merging often sequential stages involved with
the generation of visual outputs, I highlight how proliferating web-based
24 Timothy Webmoor
visualizations challenge analytic models oriented by paper-based media.
Computerized visualizations, such as those in this case study, are open-
ended. They require constant care in the form of coding in order to be sus-
tained on the Internet. Moreover, they are open in terms of their continuing
influence in a feedback cycle that plays into both the sourcing of data and
the programming involved to render the data visually.
Codework, as an emergent and distinct form of practice in scientific
research involving visualization, also blends several sets of binary catego-
ries often deployed in visual studies: private/public, visible/invisible, mate-
rial/immaterial. While these are of interest, I focus upon the manner in
which code confounds the binary of creativity/containment and discuss the
implications for the political economy of similar visualization labs and the
accountability of codework. For clarity, I partially parse these categories
and activities in what follows.

SOURCING/PROGRAMMING/VISUALIZING

The July 6, 2010 edition of The Guardian, a very popular UK newspaper,

featured a map of London on the second page compiled from “tweets,”
or posts to the microblogging service Twitter. It resembled a topographic
map in that it visually depicted the density of tweeting activity around the
city by using classic hypsometric shading from landscape representations.
Given that there was a mountain over Soho, it was apparent to anyone
familiar with the city that the data being visualized were not topographi-
cal. The caption read, “London’s Twitterscape: Mapping the City Tweet by
Tweet.”3 It was good publicity for the lab. The visualizations were a spin-off
or side project of one of the PhD researchers. As he stated, it was an experi-
ment “to get at the social physics of large cities through Twitter activity”
(Informant 4, July 7, 2010). It was one of my earliest visits to the lab at a
time when research deploying emergent social media such as Facebook,
Flickr, Foursquare and Twitter, or other online sources such as Wikipedia
editing activity, was in its infancy (see Viégas and Wattenberg 2004 as an
early example). Indeed, many of these now popular online services did not
exist before 2006.
Sourcing the data to visualize from these online platforms is not particu-
larly difficult. It does, however, take an understanding of how the data are
encoded, how they might be “mined” and made portable with appropriate
programming, and whether the information will be amenable to visual-
izing. These programming skills are driven by a creative acumen; knowing
where to look online for information relevant to research and/or commer-
cial interests, and whether it might provide interesting and useful, or at
least aesthetic, visualizations. Creative sourcing and programming are nec-
essary crafts of codework.
 Algorithmic Alchemy 25
Many online services, such as Twitter, provide data through an appli-
cation programming interface (API). Doing so allows third-party devel-
opers to provide “bolt-on” applications, and this extensibility benefits
the service provider through increased usage. “There’s an app for that!”:
It is much like developing “apps” for Apple iTunes or Google Android.
Importantly, though, sourcing these APIs or “scraping” web pages for
data to visualize does require programming, and both the format of the
data and the programming language(s) involved heavily determine the
“fi nal” visualizations themselves.
In the case of Twitter, the company streams “live” a whole set of infor-
mation bundled with every tweet. Most of this information, such as Internet
protocol (IP) location, browser or service used to tweet, link to user profi le
and sometimes latitude and longitude coordinates (with a 5–15 m accu-
racy), is not apparent to users of the service.4 The researchers at the London
lab applied to Twitter to download this open data from their development
site. 5 The format is key for what types of visualization will be possible,
or at least how much translation of the data by code will be required. For
instance, as discussed later, many open data sources are already encoded
in a spatial format like Keyhole Markup Language (KML) for display in
industry standard analytic software and mapping platforms (for Google
Earth or in ESRI’s geographic information system [GIS] programs such as
ArcGIS). Twitter, like most social media companies, government institu-
tions and scientific organizations, formats its data as comma-separated val-
ues (CSV). For simplicity and portability across programming languages,
this format for organizing data has become the primary de facto standard
for open datasets. Information is arranged in tabular format much like an
Excel or Numbers spreadsheet, and values are separated by either a comma
or a tab-spacing (tabular-space values [TSV] format is a variety of CSV).
The London lab logged a week’s worth of tweets for various metropolises.
This amounted to raw data tables containing about 150,000 tweets and
over 1.5 million discrete data points for each city. Such massive datasets
could be visualized based upon various criteria—for instance, semanti-
cally for word frequency or patterning. Importantly, being in CSV format
means that the Twitter data are highly mutable by a wide range of pro-
gramming languages, and therefore there are a number of possible paths
to visualization.
The researcher was interested in tying such Twitter “landscapes” into his
larger PhD research involving travel patterns in the city of London. Spatial
and temporal aspects were therefore most important, and a program was
written to mine the data for spatial coordinates within a certain radius of
the urban centers, as well as for time stamps. When and where a Twitter
user sent a tweet could then be plotted. Once aggregated, the visualizations
indicated patterns of use in terms of diurnal and weekly activity. They also
suggested varying usage around the cities of concern.
26 Timothy Webmoor
Sourcing data packaged as CSV files was common for the laboratory.
Indeed, in step with the growing online, open data repositories, where much
data are user-generated and least user-contributed, the lab was developing a
visualizing middle-ware program to display spatial data based upon Open-
StreetMap and OpenLayers.6 “A place to share maps and compare data
visually,” as their website states, is the goal. Unlike either large commercial
companies that typically fund and manage server farms where these large
datasets are uploaded, such as Google’s Spreadsheets or Yahoo!’s Pipes, or
commercially funded research groups like IBM’s ManyEyes,7 this lab was
providing a visualizing tool, or “visualizer,” that would fetch data which
was located remotely. Otherwise, despite the recent purchase of three new
Dell stacked servers located in a closet in the hallway, there simply was not
enough storage space for the modest lab to host the huge datasets. Described
as “a service for researchers,” the web-based platform would, for example,
“serve up on an ad hoc basis a visualization of the dataset whenever a query
was made by a user” (Informant 1, November 10, 2010). As he went on to
unpack the operation, when a user selected a set of statistics (e.g., crime
statistics) to display over a selected region (e.g., the UK), there were a host
of operations that had to transpire rapidly, and all hinged upon the web-
based platform and the coding the researcher had written and “debugged”
(and rewritten). These operations might be thought of as putting together
layers consisting of different information and different formats in order to
build a complexly laminar visualization. As the informant described, the
programming allows the “fusing of CSV data [like census data] with geo-
spatial data [coordinates] on a tile by tile basis [portions of the map viewed
on the screen] . . . this involves three servers and six websites” (Informant
1, November 10, 2010). Data, plug-ins and the program code itself were
variously dispersed and are pulled together to form the visualization on a
user’s screen—hence the “middle” or go-between function of the software
package developed by the lab and later released as GMapCreator. For pro-
gramming web-based visualizations, code is coordination work.
In addition to the growing online datasets stored primarily as CSV fi les,
many government agencies now provide their stored data in accessible
digital repositories. The UK’s data.london.gov.uk was another popular
archive where the visualization lab and other researchers were obtaining
UK census data. This was variously fetched and displayed as a dynamic,
interactive map through the lab’s web-based platform. Twenty-seven
months after the initial launch of the visualizing platform, 885 datas-
ets had been “uploaded” to the map visualizer (or more precisely shared
through linking to a remote server where the datasets were physically
stored) and there were “about 10,000 users for the program” (Informant
1, November 10, 2010).
Other data was being sourced by the lab through scraping. While
the “ready-made” data stream from Twitter’s API or other online data
 Algorithmic Alchemy 27
repository requires some initial coding to obtain the data—for instance,
writing a program to log data for a specified period of time as in the case
of the Twitterscapes—web-scraping typically requires more involved code-
work. Frequently, the data scraped must go through a series of steps all
defi ned by code in order to be useful; and in many cases converted into a
standard data format such as CSV.
Let’s consider another example from the visualization lab. One of the
programmers was interested in getting at “the social demography of,
and city dynamics relating to, bike share usage” (Informant 5, Octo-
ber 19, 2010). Bike share or bike rentals programs had recently become
quite popular in international cities. London’s own bike sharing scheme,
known as the Barclay’s Cycle Hire after its principal commercial con-
tributor, was launched on June 30, 2010, and represents a quite large
and well-utilized example. Visualizing and making publicly accessible
the status of the bike share schemes piggybacks off of the data that the
corporate managers of the various schemes collect for operational pur-
poses. The number of bikes at each docking station (London has over
560 stations) is updated electronically every three minutes. The stages
involved begin with the programmer using the “view source” feature in
the web browser Firefox to de-visualize the “front end” of the commer-
cial websites in order to assess what types of information are encoded.
The “back end” or source code of the scheme’s website showed several
types of information that could be rendered spatially. Specifically, time
stamps, dock location and number of bicycles were data he thought could
be harvested from these websites. With visualizations in mind, he was
confident “that they would be something cool to put out there” (Infor-
mant 5, September 23, 2010). He wrote a code in Python to parse the
information scraped to narrow in on geographic coordinates and num-
ber of bicycles. Using a MySQL database to store the information, the
Python program pulled the selected data into CSV format by removing
extraneous information (such as HTML markup). A cron program was
written to schedule how frequently the web scraping takes place. Finally,
the programmer aggregated the information scraped for each individual
bike station to scale up to the entire system or city. To visualize the data,
he used JavaScript to make it compatible with many web-based map dis-
plays, such as Google Maps. In this case, he used OpenStreetMap with
(near) real time information displayed for ninety-nine cities worldwide
(Figure 1.2). Finally, he used Google’s Visualization API8 to generate and
embed the charts and graphs. Several months after the world bike shar-
ing schemes visualizer went live, the programmer related how he was
contacted by the corporate managers of four different international cities
asking him “to take down the visualizations . . . likely because it made
apparent which schemes were being underutilized and poorly managed”
(Informant 7, October 27, 2010).
28 Timothy Webmoor

Figure 1.2 Cached MySQL database consisting of number of bicycles and time
stamps “scraped” from websites (on left) with the near real time visualization of the
data in JavaScript (on right; in this case London’s bicycle share scheme). Bubbles
indicate location of bicycle docks, with size proportional to the number of bicycles
currently available. Colored lines show movement of bicycles between dock stations
(Informant 5, October 19, 2010).

SOURCING/PROGRAMMING/VISUALIZING

Visualizations crafted by the lab were clearly having a form of public “impact”
and response. While not necessarily the type of impact accredited within the
political economy of academia, the lab was all the same successful in attract-
ing more funding based upon a reputation of expanding public engagement
with its web presence. As the director remarked, “We are flush with grant
money right now . . . we are chasing the impact” (October 19, 2010).
Not dissimilarly to other studies of scientifi c visualizations (e.g., Beau-
lieu 2001; Lynch and Edgerton 1988; Lynch and Ridder-Vignone this
volume), there was a need to pursue public outreach achieved through
accessible visualizations. At the same time, the researchers and program-
mers themselves de-emphasized such “fi nal” visualizations. Of course, I
overheard several informants speaking approvingly of the visual styles
used by colleagues in the lab. “He has good visualizations” (Informant
7, October 27, 2010) was a typical, if infrequent, response to my queries
about their fellow researchers. More often, though, were the comments:
 Algorithmic Alchemy 29
“He has clean code” (Informant 5, October 27, 2010); or “the style of
programming is very important . . . everything around the actual algo-
rithm, even the commenting [leaving lines within the code prefaced by ‘//’
so as not to be readable/executable by the computer] is very important”
(Informant 2, June 10, 2011). More than visualizations or data, the pro-
gramming skill that made both possible was identified as the guarantor of
reliability in web-based visualizations.
“Code is king” assertions contrast with previous studies where research-
ers engaging visualizations stated greater confidence in, or preference for,
the supposed raw data visualized. In this laboratory, the programmers and
researchers tended to hold a confl icted opinion of data. Ingenuity in fi nd-
ing sources of data to visualize was admired, such as with the bike share
scheme or the Twitter maps. Equally, the acts of researchers who leveraged
open data initiatives to amass new repositories, such as making requests
through the Freedom of Information Act to the Transport for London (TfL)
to release transportation statistics, were approvingly mentioned (e.g., Infor-
mant 5, November 10, 2010). Yet once sourced, the data tended to recede
into the background or bedrock as a substrate to be worked upon through
programming skill.

Everyone has their preferred way of programming, and preferred style

of programming . . . The data is much more clearly defi ned. The struc-
ture of the data and how you interface, or interact, with it. Whereas
programming is so much more complex. It’s not so easy . . . maybe
sounds like it’s isolated. But it’s really hundreds of lines of code. (Infor-
mant 3, June 10, 2011)

Like this informant, many felt that the data were fairly “static and
closed,” and for this reason were less problematic and, consequently, less
interesting to work with. One programmer explained, with reference to
the prevalence of digital data in CSV format, that you need to “use a
base-set that was ubiquitous . . . because web-based visualizations were
changing constantly . . . with new versions being released every week or
so” (Informant 1, June 13, 2011). Such a perception of data as a relatively
stable “base” was often declared in contrast to the code to “mash up” the
data and render it readable by the many changing platforms and plug-
ins. As a go-between, code has to be dynamic to ensure the data remains
compatible with the perpetually changing platforms for visualizing. Pro-
grammers often bemoaned how much time they spent updating their code
to keep their visualizations and platforms live on the Internet. Informant
1 (November 10, 2010) explained how he was “developing a point-click
interface to make it easier to use the site [the mapping visualizer that
the lab hosted], but it requires much more KML [a standard geospatial
markup language] to make it compatible with Google Maps and Open-
StreetMap [which the site used to display the maps].” When Google or
30 Timothy Webmoor
another API provider updated their software, the programmers often had
to update the code for their visualizations accordingly.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, activities that required skill were more highly
regarded. These preferences fed into the treatment of data vis-à-vis code
in terms of lab management. There was much informal sharing of datasets
that had already been sourced, sharing links to where relevant data might
be found, or otherwise discussing interesting and pertinent information for
one another’s research projects. To make sharing and collaborating with
data easier and more accountable, the lab was beginning to set up a data
repository using Trac, an open source project management program, on a
central server. When asked about a code repository, the informant identi-
fied the need, but admitted that a “data repository was much less of a prob-
lem” (Informant 5, October 13, 2010). Instead, despite “revision control
being essential to programming . . . and taught in the 2nd year of software
engineering,” it was largely left to the individual programmer to create a
“code repository so that [you] can back up to where [the software] was
working . . . like a safety net” (Informant 2, March 16, 2011).
Updating the felicitous phrase describing Victorian sex, code was every-
where admired, spoken about and inherent to the survival of the lab, but
never shared. This incongruous observation prompted a conversation later
in the fieldwork:

TW: You don’t share code, you share data?

Informant: Mostly data, not so much code. The thing with data, once you
load it and you have your algorithms, you can start to transform
the data in different ways. You can also (pause) . . . quite often
you download data in a certain format, and you load it, and your
programming transforms it in different ways. Then it becomes
useful . . . With C++ there is no boundary to what you can do.
TW: So you can do whatever with the data. So you do that by writing
new code? Do you write a bit of code in C++?
Informant: I do it all the time. It’s how I spend my days. (Informant 3, June
10, 2011)

Programming was held in deference for two principal reasons. First, as a

creative skill it was seen as proprietary (see Graham 2004 on the paral-
lels between artists and programmers). It was not something that could
be straightforwardly taught, but as a craft it was learned on the job; and
programmers strove to improve this skill in order to write the cleanest,
most minimalist code. This fostered a defi nite peer awareness and review
of code. These interpersonal dynamics fed into the larger management and
economy of the lab already mentioned. This lab was chasing the impact.
To do so they were creating “fast visualizations.” In addition, as discussed
with respect to the mapping visualizer, web-based visualizations rely upon
middle-ware or go-between programs gathering distributed data and
 Algorithmic Alchemy 31
rendering it on an ad hoc basis on the computer screen. Given the larger
infrastructural medium, the lab’s visualizations needed constant coding
and recoding in order to maintain operability with the rapidly changing
software platforms and APIs that they were tied to. Each researcher who
began a project had to quickly and on an ad hoc basis develop code that
could render source data visually. Intended for rapid results but not neces-
sarily long-term sustainability, the only reasonable way to manage such
projects was to minimize confusion and the potential for working at cross-
purposes by leaving the coding to individuals. At a smaller research lab
where programming happens, this was feasible. At larger, corporate labora-
tories, the many tasks of codework are often broken up in a Fordist manner
among several specialists: software engineers, network engineers, graphic
designers. All of whom may be involved in creating web-based visualizing
platforms. Bolted together by teams, such coding is more standardized,
minimalist and therefore more compatible and fungible.
In contrast, the London lab found itself in a double-bind of sorts. They
clearly knew they needed some form of accountability of the code produced
by the lab: “Revision control is essential for the lab” (Informant 2, March
2, 2011). At the same time, the success of the lab in garnering fi nancial sup-
port, the “soft funding” it was entirely dependent upon, was largely due “to
the creative mix of code and tools” and the “hands-off management style”
(Director, March 2, 2011). Individual researchers were therefore largely left
to practice their own codework.
Secondly, in addition to being a highly creative and skilled craft, writing
code, and specifically the code itself, was seen as dynamic and potent in
relation to data. Mackenzie discusses the agency of code in general terms
with respect to its ability to have effects at a distance (2005, 2006)—for
instance, forging a shared sense of identity among the internationally based
software engineers who develop the open source software Unix. For this
lab, the software they were writing had agency in the very defi nite sense
of transforming data. You want to “build an algorithm so you have good
performance” (Informant 6, October 13, 2010). Unlike code more gener-
ally, which includes human-readable comments and other instructions, an
algorithm is a subset or specific type of code that is expressly written for a
computer to perform a specified function in a defi ned manner. The defi n-
ing function of many algorithms in computer programming is the ability
to manipulate data. For instance, as the informant describes ahead, a basic
operation of algorithms is precisely the transformation of data from one
format (e.g., the markup language KML) to a different format (e.g., C++).

An algorithm performs a well-defi ned task. Like sorting a series of

numbers, for example. Like a starting point [for the] input of data and
output of data in different formats. You can do everything with source
code. You can write algorithms, but you can do all other kinds of stuff
as well. (Informant 3, June 10, 2011)
32 Timothy Webmoor
Code as transitive revealed the confl icting view of data as being less than
stable. In fact, during many conversations, code’s potency was estimated in
fairly direct relation to how malleable it rendered data.

TW: You transform these two sources of data that you have into XML
fi les, so that you can look at them in ArcGIS?
Informant: From ArcGIS you understand how the data, how these things
are supposed to be connected. So then you can connect the net-
work in the way it’s supposed to be connected, in your connec-
tion structure that you have defi ned in your code, in C++.
TW: Does it have to be in C++, or is that a standard for running simu-
lations? . . . So you have to transform this data in C++, let me
get at this, for a couple of reasons: One, you are familiar with
it; two, it’s going to be much faster when you make queries [as
opposed to ArcGIS]. Anything else?
Informant: Well, I’m familiar with the code. (Informant 6, October 13,
2010)

Code’s purpose was to translate and to work with data. Yet different types
of code worked on data differently. Part of this was due to personal pref-
erence and background. What certain programmers could do with code
depended upon their familiarity with it. For this reason, depending upon the
programmer, certain code was asserted to be “top end” or “higher order.”
This implies that the coding language is more generalized and so could be
written to perform many types of tasks. It also means, however, that the code
must be programmed much more extensively. Whatever code was preferred,
the acknowledgment that it transformed and manipulated data rarely led to
discussion of a potential corollary: that data were somehow “constructed”
or may become flawed. Part of this has to do with the data asserting a mea-
sure of independence from code. More specifially, the format of the data
partially determines the type of visualization pursued and so constrains to a
certain degree the coding deployed. More emphasis was, however, given to
code’s neutral operation upon data. It was held to merely translate the data’s
format for “readability” across the networked computers and programs in
order to render the visualization. Put another way, code transforms metadata
not data. The view that code transformed without corruption became most
apparent when researchers discussed the feedback role of visualization in
examining and correcting the original datasets.

SOURCING/PROGRAMMING/VISUALIZING

Most visualizations mashed up by the lab were not finalized outputs. Just
as the format of the sourced data influenced the programming required
and the choices for visualization, the visualizations themselves recursively
 Algorithmic Alchemy 33
looped back into this process of codework. Several informants flipped the
usual expectation that visualizations were end products in the information
chain by discussing their integral role at the beginning of the process.

It’s a necessary fi rst step to try and visualize certain facets of the infor-
mation. Because it does give you a really quick way of orienting your
research. You can see certain patterns straightaway . . . you literally do
need to see the big picture sometimes. It informed my research com-
pletely . . . There are some themes in your research. But you still, (pause)
the visualization informs your trajectory . . . Is part of the trajectory
of your research . . . You draw on that . . . because you see something.
(Informant 8, October 27, 2010)

For this informant, deploying “sample” visualizations allowed him to

identify patterns or other salient details in an otherwise enormous corpus
of data. He was researching with Foursquare, a social media service that
personalizes information based upon location. As he stated, he was “min-
ing their API to harvest 300,000,000 records” (Informant 8, October 27,
2010). Awash in data, he needed to reduce the complexity in order to iden-
tify and anchor research problems. Much like the lab’s resident anthropolo-
gist, he needed a visual counterpart to what was otherwise undifferentiated
and unfamiliar clutter on the computer screen.
More than suggesting what to do with mined data, another researcher
noted with pride that the working visualizations actually identified flaws
in the data. He was coding with open data from Transport for London
and the UK Ordnance Survey. Much of this entails merging traffic flow
volume (TfL data) with geospatial coordinates (Ordnance data) to create
large visuals consisting of lines (roadways, paths) and nodes (intersections).
Responding to a question about accuracy in the original data and worries
about creating errors through transforming the CSV fi les into C++, he dis-
cussed the “bridge problem.” This was an instance where the visualization
he began to run on the small scale actually pinpointed an error in the data.
Running simulations of a small set of nodes and lines, he visually noticed
traffic moving across where no roadway had been labeled. After inspecting
a topographic map, he concluded that the Ordnance Survey had not plotted
an overpass where it should have been.

TW: When you say you know exactly what is going on with the algo-
rithm, does that mean you can visualize each particular node
that is involved in this network?
Informant: Yes, once you program you can debug it where you can stop
where the algorithm is running, you can stop it at anytime and
see what kind of data it is reading and processing . . . you can
monitor it, how it behaves, what it is doing. And once you check
that and you are happy with that, you go on to a larger scale
34 Timothy Webmoor
. . . once you see what it is giving you. (Informant 6, October
13, 2010)

Running visualizations allowed the researcher to feel confident in the reli-

ability of his data as he aggregated (eventually) to the scale of the UK.
Whether visualizations were used by the lab researchers at the beginning
of the process of codework to orient their investigations, or throughout the
process to periodically corroborate the data, visualizations as final outputs
were sometimes expected. Where this was the case, especially with respect
to paper-based visualizations, many at the lab were resigned to their neces-
sity but skeptical of the quality. Several felt it was an inappropriate medium
for what were developed to be web-based and dynamic. Yet they openly
acknowledged the need for such publication within the confines of aca-
demia’s political economy.

Online publishing has to be critical. For me, my research is mainly

online. And that’s a real problem as a PhD student. Getting published
is important. And the more you publish online independently the less
scope you have to publish papers . . . still my motivation is to publish
online, particularly when it’s dynamic . . . You might have a very, very
interesting dynamic visualization that reveals a lot and its impact in
the academic community might be limited . . . the main constraint is
that these are printed quite small, that’s why I have to kind of tweak
the visuals. So they make sense when they are reproduced so small.
Because I look at them at twenty inches, on a huge screen. That’s the
main difference, really. There’s a lot of fi ne-grained stuff in there.
(Informant 8, October 27, 2010)

Set within academic strictures of both promotion and funding, the lab’s
researchers found themselves needing to generate fast visualizations, while
at the same time “freezing” them, or translating and reducing them, to fit
traditional print.

CONCLUDING DISCUSSION: CODEWORK AND

RIGHT WRITING IN SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTION

Given the way codework weaves together the many activities happening at
the visualization lab, the demands of academic publication to assign defi-
nite credit became an arena for contestation. This is because programming,
as a mode of writing and a skill integral to all of these activities, abrades
against a tradition of hierarchical assignation of authorship going back to
pre-Modern science (Shapin 1989). This tradition would restrict the role of
software programming along the lines of Shapin’s “invisible technicians.”
Writing code is not the right type of writing.
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 “Yes,” says he. “And they are a beautiful family, and I have made a
splendid bargain. 50 dollars a year for the house and garden. What
do you think now? I never should have known they was a lookin’ for
a house if I hadn’t been a enquirin’ round. What do you think now
about my keepin’ cool?”
Says I mildly, but firmly: “My mind haint changed from what it wuz
more formally.”
“Wall, what do you think now about my lettin’ the old house run
down, when I can make 50 dollars a year, clear gain, besides more’n
three times that in solid comfort a-neighberin’?”
Says I, firm as a rock, “My mind hain’t changed, Josiah Allen, so
much as the width of a horsehair.”
“Wall,” says he, “I always said wimmen hadn’t no heads, I always
knew it. But it is agravatin’, it is dumb agravatin’, when anybody has
done the head-work I have done, and made such a bargain as I have
made, to not have anybody’s wife appreciate it. And I should think it
was about time to have supper, if you are goin’ to have any to-night.”
I calmly rose and put on the teakettle, and never disputed a word
with him whether I had a head or not. Good land! I knew I had one,
and what was the use of arguin’ about it? And I didn’t say nothin’
more about his bargain, for I see it wouldn’t do no good. ’Twas all
settled, and the writin’s drawed. But I kep’ up a severe thinkin’. I had
heard of Spinks’es folks before. It had come right straight to me.
Miss Ebenezer Gowdey, she that was Nabby Widrick, her nephew’s
wive’s step-mother, old Miss Tooler, had lived neighber to ’em. And
Miss Tooler told Nabby, and Nabby told me, that they was shiftless
creeters. But when bargains are all made, it is of no use tryin’ to
convince Josiahs. And I knew if I should tell Josiah what I had heard
he’d only go to arguin’ agin that I hadn’t no head. So I didn’t say
nothin’. And the next day they moved in. It seems they had brought
all their things to Thrashers’es. They said the house they had been
livin’ in to Zoar was so uncomfortable they couldn’t stay in it a day
longer. But we heard afterwards—Miss Tooler told Nabby Gowdey
with her own lips—that they was smoked out. The man that owned
the house smoked ’em out to get rid of ’em.
 Wall, as I said, they come. Mr.
Spink, his wife, and his wife’s
sister (she was Irish), and the
childern. And oh! how neat
Josiah Allen did feel. He was
over there before they had
hardly got sot down, and
offered to do anything under
the sun for ’em, and offered ’em
everything we had in the house.
I, myself, kep’ cool and
collected together. Though I
treated ’em in a liberal way, and
in the course of two or three
days I made ’em a friendly call,
and acted well towards ’em.
But instead of runnin’ over
there the next day, and two or
three times a day, I made a
practice of stayin’ to home
considerable; and Josiah took
me to do for it. But I told him I
treated them exactly as I
wanted them to treat me. Says
I, “A mejum course is the best
course to pursue in nearly every
enterprise in life, neighberin’
especially. I begin as I can hold
ARRIVAL OF THE SPINKSES. out. I lay out to be kind and
friendly to ’em, but I don’t
intend to make it my home with
them, nor do I want them to make it their home with me. Once in
two or three days is enough, and enough, Josiah Allen, is as good as
a feast.”
“Wall,” says he, “if I ever enjoyed anything in this world I enjoy
neighberin’ with them folks. And they think the world of me. It beats
all how they worship me. The childern take to me so, they don’t
want me out of their sight hardly a minute. Spink and his wife says
they think it is in my looks. You know I am pretty lookin’, Samantha.
They say the baby will cry after me so quick. It beats all what friends
we have got to be, I and the Spinkses, and it is agravatin’,
Samantha, to think you don’t seem to feel towards ’em that strong
friendship that I feel.”
Says I, “Friendship, Josiah Allen, is a great word. True friendship is
the most beautiful thing on earth; it is love without passion,
tenderness without alloy. And,” says I, soarin’ up into the realm of
allegory, where, on the feathery wings of pure eloquence, I fly
frequent, “Intimacy hain’t friendship. Two men may sleep together,
year after year, on the same feather-bed, and wake up in the
mornin’, and shake hands with each other, perfect strangers, made
so unbeknown to them. And feather-beds, nor pillers, nor nothin’
can’t bring ’em no nigher to each other. And they can keep it up from
year to year, and lock arms and prominade together through the day,
and not get a mite closer to each other. They can keep their bodies
side by side, but their souls, who can tackle ’em together, unless
nature tackled ’em, unbeknown to them? Nobody. And then, agin,
two persons may meet, comin’ from each side of the world; and they
will look right through each other’s eyes down into their souls, and
see each other’s image there; born so, born friends, entirely
unbeknown to them. Thousands of milds apart, and all the
insperations of heaven and earth; all the influences of life, education,
joy, and sorrow, has been fitting them for each other (unbeknown to
them): twin souls, and they not knowin’ of it.”
 YOKED BUT NOT MATED.

“Speakin’ of twin—” says Josiah.

But I was soarin’ too high to light down that minute. So I kep’ on,
though his interruption was a-lowerin’ me down gradual.
“There is a great filisofical fact right here, Josiah Allen,” says I,
tryin’ to bring down and fit the idee to my pardner’s comprehension,
for it is ever my way to try to convince, as well as to soar in oritory.
“You may yoke up the old mare and the brindle cow together and
drive ’em year after year in a buggy. But you can’t make that horse
into a cow, or make that old cow whinner. It can’t be done. And two
wimmen may each of ’em have half a shear, and think they will
screw ’em together and save property, and cut some with ’em. But if
one of them halves is 2 or 3 inches shorter than the other, and
narrower, how be they goin’ to cut with ’em? All the screws and
wrenches in creation can’t do no more than hold ’em together. It
hain’t no use if they wuzn’t made to fit each other in the first place,
unbeknown to them.” Says I, “Some folks are j’ined together for life
in jest that way, drawn together by some sort of influence, worldly
considerations, blind fancy, thoughtlessness, and the minister’s
words fasten ’em, jest as these shears was. But good land! after the
vapory, dreamy time of the honeymoon is passed through, and the
heavy, solid warp and woof of life lays before ’em for them to cut a
path through it, they’ll find out whether they fit each other or not.
And if they don’t, it is tejus business for ’em, extremely tejus, and
they’ll find it out so.”—“Speakin’ of twin—” says Josiah.
 JOSIAH NEIGHBORS.

His persistent and stiddy follerin’ up of his own train of thought,

and the twin, was lowerin’ me down now awful fast, and says I, sort
o’ concludin’ up, “Be good and kind to everybody, and Mr. Spinks’es
folks, as you have opportunity; but before you make bosom friends
of ’em, wait and see if your soul speaks.” Says I, firmly, “Mine don’t,
in this case.”
“Speakin’ of twin,” says Josiah agin, “Did you ever see so beautiful
a twin as Mr. Spinks’es twin is? What a pity they lost the mate to it!
Their ma says it is perfectly wonderful the way that babe takes to
me. I held it all the while she was ironin’, this forenoon. And the two
boys foller me round all day, tight to my heels, instead of their father.
Spink says they think I am the prettiest man they ever see, almost
perfectly beautiful.”
I give Josiah Allen a look full in his face, a curious look, very
searchin’ and peculiar. But before I had time to say anything, only
jest that look, the door opened, and Spinks’es wive’s sister come in
unexpected, and said that Miss Spink wanted to borrow the loan of
ten pounds of side pork, a fine comb, some flour, the dish-kettle, and
my tooth-brush.
I let her have ’em all but the tooth-brush, for I was determined to
use ’em well. And Josiah didn’t like it at all because I didn’t let that
go. And he said in a fault-findin’, complainin’ axent “that I didn’t
seem to want to be sociable.”
And I told him that “I thought borrowin’ a tooth-brush was a little
too sociable.”
And he most snapped my head off, and muttered about my not
bein’ neighborly, and that I didn’t feel a mite about neighborin’ as he
did. And I made a vow, then and there (inside of my mind), that I
wouldn’t say a word to Josiah Allen on the subject, not if they
borrowed us out of house and home. Thinkses I, I can stand it as
long as he can; if they spile our things, he has got to pay for new
ones; if they waste our property, he has got to lose it; if they spile
our comfort, he’s got to stand it as well as I have; and, knowin’ the
doggy obstinacy of his sect, I considered this great truth, and acted
on it, that the stiller I kep’, and the less I said about ’em, the quicker
he’d get sick of ’em; so I held firm. And never let on to Josiah but
what it was solid comfort to me to have ’em there all the time a
most; and not have a minute I could call my own; and have ’em
borrow everything under the sun that ever was borrowed: garden-
sass of all kinds, and the lookin’-glass, groceries, the old cat, vittles,
cookin’ utensils, stove-pipe, a feather-bed, bolsters, bed-clothes, and
the New Testament.
They even borrowed Josiah’s clothes. Why, Spink wore Josiah’s
best pantaloons more than Josiah did. He got so he didn’t act as if
he could stir out without Josiah’s best pantaloons. He’d keep a tellin’
that he was goin’ to get a new pair, but he didn’t get ’em, and would
hang onto Josiah’s. And Josiah had to stay to home a number of
times jest on that account. And then he’d borrow Josiah’s galluses.
Josiah had got kinder run out of galluses, and hadn’t got but one
pair of sound ones. And Josiah would have to pin his pantaloons
onto his vest, and the pins would lose out, and it was all Josiah could
do to keep his clothes on. It made it awful bad for him. I know one
day, when I had a lot of company, I had to wink him out of the room
a number of times, to fix himself so he would be decent. But all
through it I kep’ still, and never said a word. I see we was loosin’
property fast, and had lost every mite of comfort we had enjoyed,
for there was some of ’em there every minute of the time, a most,
and some of the time two or three of ’em. Why, Miss Spink used to
come over and eat breakfast with us lots of times. She’d say she felt
so mauger that she couldn’t eat nothin’ to home, and she thought
mebby my vittles would go to the place. And besides losin’ our
property and comfort, I’ll be hanged if I didn’t think sometimes that I
should lose my pardner by ’em, they worked him so. But I held firm.
Thinkses I to myself, it must be that Josiah will get sick of
neighborin’, after a while, and start ’em off. For the sufferin’s that
man endured couldn’t never be told nor sung.
Why, before they had been there a month, as I told sister Bamber,
—she was to our house a visitin’, and Josiah was in the buttery a
churnin’, and I knew he wouldn’t hear,—says I: “They have borrowed
everything I have got, unless it is Josiah.”
And if you’ll believe it, before I had got the words out of my
mouth, Miss Spinks’es sister opened the door, and walked in, and
asked me “if I could spare Mr. Allen to help stretch a carpet.”
And I whispered to sister Bamber, and says I: “If they haint
borrowed the last thing now; if they haint borrowed Josiah.”
But I told the girl “to take him an’ welcome.” (I was very polite to
’em, and meant to be, but cool.)
 BORROWIN’ JOSIAH.

So I took holt and done the churnin’ myself, and let him go. And
he come home perfectly tuckered out. Wasn’t good for nothin’ hardly
for several days. He got strained somehow a pullin’ on that carpet.
But after that they would send for him real often to help do some
job. They both took as much agin liberty with Josiah as they did with
me; they worked him down almost to skin and bones. Besides all the
rest he suffered. Why, his cow-sufferin’ alone was perfectly awful.
They had a cow, a high-headed creeter; as haughty a actin’ cow as I
ever see in my life. She would hold her head right up, and walk over
our fence, and tramp through the garden. I didn’t know how Josiah
felt about it, but I used to think myself that I could have stood it as
well agin if it hadn’t been so high headed. It would look so sort o’
independent and overbearin’ at me, when it was a walkin’ through
the fence, and tramplin’ through the garden. Josiah always laid out
his beds in the garden with a chalk-line, as square and beautiful as
the pyramids, and that cow jest leveled ’em to the ground. They tied
her up nights, but she would get loose, and start right for our
premises; seemed to take right to us, jest as the rest of ’em did. But
I held firm, for I see that gettin’ up night after night, and goin’ out in
the night air, chasin’ after that cow, was coolin’ off my companion’s
affection for the Spinkses.
 SPINKS’ES COW—A NIGHT SCENE.

And then they kept the awfulest sight of hens. I know Josiah was
dretful tickled with the idee at first, and said, “mebby we could swap
with ’em, get into their kind of hens.”
And I told him in a cautious way “that I shouldn’t wonder a mite if
we did.”

OUR HEN-DAIRY.

Wall, them hens seemed to feel jest as the rest of the family did;
didn’t seem to want to stay to home a minute, but flocked right over
onto us; stayed right by us day and night; would hang round our
doors and door-steps, and come into the house every chance they
could get, daytimes; and nights, would roost right along on the door-
yard fence, and the front porch, and the lilack bushes, and the
pump. Why, the story got out that we was keepin’ a hen-dairy, and
strangers who thought of goin’ into the business would stop and
holler to Josiah, and ask him if he found it profitable to keep so
many hens. And I’d see that man shakin’ his fist at ’em, after they
would go on, he would be that mad at ’em. Somehow the idee of
keepin’ a hen-dairy was always dretful obnoxious to Josiah, though it
is perfectly honorable, as far as I can see.
Finally, he had made so much of ’em, the two boys got to thinkin’
so much of Josiah that they wanted to sleep with him, and he,
thinkin’ it wouldn’t be neighborly to refuse, let ’em come every little
while. And they kicked awfully. They kicked Josiah Allen till he was
black and blue. It come tough on Josiah, but I didn’t say a word,
only I merely told him “that of course he couldn’t expect me to sleep
with the hull neighborhood,” so I went off, and slept in the settin’-
room bedroom. It made me a sight of work, but I held firm.
At last Spink and his wife, and his wife’s sister, got into the habit of
goin’ off nights to parties, and leavin’ the twin with Josiah. And
though it almost broke my heart to see his sufferin’s, still, held up by
principle, and the aim I had in view, I would go off and sleep in the
settin’-room bedroom, and let Josiah tussle with it. Sometimes it
would have the colic most all night, and the infantum, and the
snuffles. But, though I could have wept when I heerd my pardner a
groanin’ and a sithein’ in the dead of night, and a callin’ on heaven
to witness that no other man ever had the sufferin’s he was a
sufferin’, still, held up by my aim, I would lay still, and let it go on.
It wore on Josiah Allen. His health seemed to be a runnin’ down;
his morals seemed to be loose and totterin’; he would snap me up
every little while as if he would take my head off; and unbeknown to
him I would hear him a jawin’ to himself, and a shakin’ his fist at
nothin’ when he was alone, and actin’. But I kep’ cool, for though he
didn’t come out and say a word to me about the Spinkses, still I felt
a feelin’ that there would be a change. But I little thought the
change was so near.
But one mornin’ to the breakfast-table, as I handed Josiah his
fourth cup of coffee, he says to me, says he:
 “Samantha, sposen we go to Brother Bamberses to-day, and
spend the day. I feel,” says he, with a deep sithe, “I feel as if I
needed a change.”
Says I, lookin’ pityingly on his pale and haggard face, “you do,
Josiah,” and says I, “if I was in your place I would speak to Brother
Bamber about the state of your morals.” Says I, in a tender yet firm
tone, “I don’t want to scare you, Josiah, nor twit you, but your
morals seem to be a totterin’; I am afraid you are a back-slidin’,
Josiah Allen.”
He jumped right up out of his chair, and shook his fist over
towards the Spinks’es house, and hollered out in a loud, awful tone:
“My morals would be all right if it wuzn’t for them dumb Spinkses,
dumb ’em.”
You could have knocked me down with a pin-feather (as it were), I
was that shocked and agitated; it had all come onto me so sudden,
and his tone was so loud and shameful. But before I could say a
word he went on, a shakin’ his fist vehementer and wilder than I
ever see a fist shook:
“I guess you be neighbored with as I have been, and slept with by
two wild-cats, and be kicked till you are black and blue, and mebby
you’d back-slide!”
Says I: “Josiah Allen, if you don’t go to see Brother Bamber to-day,
Brother Bamber shall come and see you. Did I ever expect to live,”
says I, with a gloomy face, “to see my pardner rampagin’ round
worse than any pirate that ever swum the seas, and shakin’ his fist,
and actin’. I told you in the first on’t, Josiah Allen, to begin as you
could hold out.”
“What if you did?” he yelled out. “Who thought we’d be borrowed
out of house and home, and visited to death, and trampled over by
cows, and roosted on; who s’posed they’d run me over with twin,
and work me down to skin and bone, and foller me ’round tight to
my heels all day, and sleep with me nights, and make dumb lunaticks
of themselves? Dumb em!”
Says I in firm accents, “Josiah Allen, if you swear another swear
to-day, I’ll part with you before Squire Baker.” Says I, “It betters it,
don’t it, for you to start up and go to swearin’.”
 Before Josiah could answer me a word, the door opened and in
come Miss Spink’ses sister. They never none of ’em knocked, but
dropped right down on us unexpected, like sun-strokes.
Says she, with a sort of a haughty, independent mean onto her
(some like their cow’s mean), and directin’ her conversation to
Josiah:
“Mr. Spink is goin’ to have his likeness took, to-day, and he would
be glad to borrow the loan of your pantaloons and galluses. And he
said if you didn’t want your pantaloons to go without your boots
went with ’em, he guessed he’d wear your boots, as his had been
heel-tapped and might show. And the two boys bein’ so took up with
you, Mr. Allen, their Ma thought she’d let ’em come over here and
sleep with you while they was gone; they didn’t know but they might
stay several days to her folks’es, as they had heard of a number of
parties that was goin’ to be held in that neighborhood. And knowin’
you hadn’t no little childern of your own, she thought it might be
agreeable to you to keep the twin, while they was gone—and—and
—”
She hadn’t got through with her speech, and I don’t know what
she would have tackled us for next. But the door opened without no
warnin’, and in come Miss Spink herself, and she said that “Spink had
been urgin’ her to be took, too, and they kinder wanted to be took
holt of hands, and they thought if Josiah and me had some kid
gloves by us, they would borrow the loan of ’em; they thought it
would give ’em a more genteel, aristocratic look. And as for the
childern,” says she, “we shall go off feelin’ jest as safe and happy
about ’em as if they was with us, they love dear Mr. Allen so.” And
says she with a sweet smile, “I have lived on more places than I can
think of hardly—we never have lived but a little while in a place,
somehow the climates didn’t agree with us long at a time. But never,
in all the places we have lived in, have we ever had such neighbors,
never, never did we take such solid comfort a-neighborin’, as we do
here.”
Josiah jumped right upon his feet, and shook his fist at her, and
says he, in a more skareful tone than he had used as yet:
 “You have got to stop it. If you don’t stop neighberin’ with me, I’ll
know the reason why.”
Miss Spink looked skairt, and agitated awful, but I laid hands on
him, and says I, “Be calm, Josiah Allen, and compose yourself
down.”
“I won’t be calm!” says he; “I won’t be composed down.”
Says I, firmly, still a-keepin’ between him and her, and still a-layin’
holt of him, “You must, Josiah!”
“I tell you I won’t, Samantha! I’ll let you know,” says he, a-shakin’
his fist at her powerful, “I’ll let you know that you have run me over
with twin for the last time; I’ll let you know that I have been
trampled over, and eat up by cows, and roosted on, and slept with
for the last time,” says he, shakin’ both fists at at her. “You have
neighbored your last neighbor with me, and I’ll let you know you
have.”
Says I, “Josiah Allen, I tell you to compose yourself down.”
“And I tell you again, Samantha, that I won’t!”
But I could see that his voice was sort ’o lowerin’ down, and I
knew the worst was over. I spoke sort ’o soothin’ly to him, and told
him, in tender axents, that he shouldn’t be neighbored with another
mite; and finally, I got him quieted down. But he looked bad in the
face, and his sithes was fearful.
My feelin’s for that man give me strength to give Miss Spink a
piece of my mind. My talk was calm, but to the purpose, and very
smart. It was a very little on the allegory way. I told her jest how I
felt about mejum courses; how sweet and happyfyin’ it was to
pursue ’em.
Says I, “Fire is first-rate, dretful comfortin’ for warmin’ and cookin’
purposes; too much fire is bad, and leads to conflagrations, martyrs,
and etcetery. Water is good; too much leads to drowndin’, dropsy,
and-so-forth. Neighborin’ is good, first-rate, if follered mejumly. Too
much neighborin’ leads to weariness, anarky, kicks, black and blue
pardners, and almost delerious Josiahs.”
As quick as I mentioned the word kick, I see a change in Josiah’s
face; he begun to shake his fist, and act; I see he was a-growin’ wild
agin; Miss Spink see it too, and she and her sister fled.
 That very afternoon Josiah went to Jonesville and served some
papers onto ’em. They hadn’t made no bargain, for any certain time,
so by losin’ all his rent, he got rid of ’em before the next afternoon.
And says he to me that night, as he sot by the fire rubbin’ some
linement onto his legs where he had been kicked, says he to me:
“Samantha, if any human bein’ ever comes to rent that house of
me, I’ll shoot ’em down, jest as I would a mushrat.”

JOSIAH’S VOW.

I knew he had lost over two hundred dollars by ’em, and been
kicked so lame that he couldn’t stand on his feet hardly. I knew that
man had been neighbored almost into his grave, but I couldn’t set by
calmly and hear him talk no such wickedness, and so says I:
 “Josiah Allen, can’t you ever learn to take a mejum course? You
needn’t go round huntin’ up renters, or murder ’em if they come nigh
you.” Says I, “You must learn to be more moderate and mejum.”
But he kep’ right on, a-pourin’ out the linement on his hand, and
rubbin’ it onto his legs, and stuck to it to the last. Says he, “I’d shoot
him down, jest as I would a mushrat; and there hain’t a law in the
land but what would bear me out in it.”
 MORALIZIN’ AND EPISODIN’.

A nybody would have thought that this episode (Spink episode)

would have sickened Josiah Allen of launchin’ out into any more
headwork, and tryin’ to made money on a speck. But if you’ll believe
it, Jonathan Spink’ses folks hadn’t been gone three weeks—for Kitty
come back the day after Spink’ses folks left, and she only stayed
with us two weeks that time, havin’ promised to stay a spell to
Thomas Jefferson’s, and it was only a few days after she went—and
then I knew by Josiah’s legs—the black-and-blue spots hadn’t begun
to wear off; they had just begun to turn yaller—and then I knew by
my head-dress, too—when that man come home from Jonesville one
night, cross as a bear.
I said I knew by my new head-dress. I well remember I had wore
it that afternoon for the first time, some expectin’ very genteel
company, and wantin’ to look well. But the company didn’t come,
and Kellup Cobb did. He come to bring home a cent he had
borrowed the night before at the missionary meetin’ to send for his
annual gift to the heathens. And he noticed my new cap in a minute.
He looked witherin’ and overbearin’ at it, and in a sort of a back-
handed, underground way, that I can’t bear, nor never could, he
begun to throw hints at me about it. About married women and
members of meetin’-housen spendin’ their money in such
extravagance, when they might spend it in spreadin’ the Gospel in
benighted lands—and about how awful wicked it was to be so dressy
—and et cetery, et cetery.
My cap wuz middlin’-foamin’ lookin’. I couldn’t deny it, and didn’t
try to. It wuzn’t what you might call over and above dressy, but it
was handsome, and very nice. The ribbin on it cost me 18 pence per
yard, and the cap contained two yards and a half; it was very nice.
But none too good for me, my Josiah said.
He is what you may call a close man at a bargain. (Tight, would
perhaps be a better word to express his situation.) But he loves
dearly to see me look beautiful. And he is very gay in his tastes; red
is his favorite color, and the more fiery shades of yellow; he would
be glad to see me dressed in these tints all the time. But I don’t
encourage him in the idee. Not that I think one color is wickeder
than another, but they don’t seem to be becomin’ to my style and
age.
Now this new head dress, I had picked it out and selected it with
my pardner by my side, and he whispered to me loud, as I was a-
selectin’ of it: “If you have got to have a new cap, Samantha, for
mercy’s sake get a red one.”
But I whispered to him that I should look like a fool with a red cap
on, and to keep still.
 THE NEW HEAD-DRESS.

And then he whispered agin, in a more anxious tone: “Wall then,

for pity’s sake do get yeller, or sunthin’ that has got a little color to it.
Black! black! the whole of the time; you look jest like a mourner.”
I had a black one on my hand at that time, admirin’ of it, and most
settled on it. But Josiah’s mean was such as I was a-settlin’, that I,
as a devoted pardner, and a woman of principle, compromised the
matter with Josiah and Duty, by purchasin’ one trimmed with a sort
of a pinky, lilock color. It was very becomin’ to me. But I won’t deny,
as a woman who is bred to tellin’ the truth, and not gin to deceit and
coverin’ up,—I won’t deny that the first time I tried that head-dress
on after I got home, I had my curious feelin’s. I thought mebby it
was wrong for me to buy such costly ribbin, and so much of it. And
then I worried about the color, too. Thinkses I, mebby it is too young
for me; too young for a woman who owns a bald-headed pardner
and a grandchild, and who has but few teeth left in her head.
My conscience is a perfect old tyrent, and jest drives me round
more’n half the time. I am willin’ to be drove by her as fur as I ort to
be. But sometimes, I declare for’t, I get so tuckered out with her
drivin’s, that I get fairly puzzled, and wonderin’ whether she knows
herself all the time jest what she is about; whether she is certain
that she is always a drivin’ me in the right road; and how fur I ort to
be drove by her, and when, and where to; and whether I ort to let
my intellect and common sense lay holt and help her drive. As I say,
she run me considerable of a run on this head-dress. I had a awful
time of it, and won’t deny it, and I was on the very pint several times
of carryin’ it back. But when Kellup come right out, and gin such
powerful hints about it; about extravagance, and wickedness, and
vanity; and about married wimmen settin’ sinful patterns to them
outside of meetin’-housen, and that it didn’t look likely, and et cetery,
et cetery, and so forth.
Why, as he went on a hintin’ so powerful strong, and givin’ such
burnin’ glances onto that head-dress, why, I sort o’ sprunted up, and
begun to see things on the other side plainer than I had seen ’em.
Then says I, as the eyes of my specks rested upon the apple-
boughs that filled the north kitchen winder with a glow of rosiness
and sweetness:
“The Lord don’t seem to think as you do, Kellup. Jest see how He
has dressed up that old apple-tree.” Says I: “No fashionable belle in
New York or Paris village can ever hope to wear garments so daintily
fine and sweet. No queen nor empress ever wore or ever will wear
for their coronation robes such splendid and gorgeous raiment as the
common spring suit of that old apple-tree.”
 Says Kellup, holdin’ his
head well up in the air,
and drawin’ his lips down
with a very self-righteous
drawin’, that I knew
meant head-dress,
though he didn’t come
right out and say it:
“I despise and detest
the foolishness of
display. There is more
important and serious
business on earth than
dressin’ up to look nice.”
“That is so,” says I,
“that is jest as true as
you live. Now that old
apple tree’s stiddy
business and theme is to
make sweet, juicy
apples; but at the same
time that don’t hender
her from dressin’ up, and
lookin’ well. The Lord
might have made the
APPLE BLOSSOMS.
apples grow in rows right
round the trunk from top
to bottom, with no ‘foolishness of display’ of the rosy coloring and
perfume—but He didn’t. He chose in His wisdom, which it is not for
you or me to doubt, to make it a glory and a delight to every
beholder. So beautiful that the birds sail and sing with very joy in and
out of the sweet branches, and the happy bees hum delightedly
about the honey-laden cells, and she whose name was once Smith,
has been made happy as a queen all day long, by jest lookin’ out of
that window down into the fragrant, rosy depths of sweetness and
light.”
 “Wall,” says Kellup, lookin’
keen at my head-dress, “I don’t
consider it likely, anyway, to
spend so much time a dressin’
up—it is a shiftless waste of
time, anyway.”
“Why,” says I; for the more
he scolded me, the plainer I see
the other side of things. So
curious are human bein’s
constituted and sot.
“Nater has always been
considered likely—I never heard
a word against her character,
and she is stiddy minded, too,
HOW IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. and hard workin’. She works
hard, Nater does. She works
almost beyond her strength
sometimes. She has sights of work on her hands all the hull time,
and she has a remarkable knack of turnin’ off tremendous day’s
works. And I never in my hull life heard her called shiftless or slack.
But what a case she is to orniment herself off; to rag out and show
herself in so many different colors. And if she feels better to be
dressed up and fixed off kinder pretty while she’s to work, I don’t
know whose business it is. I never was no case myself to dress up in
white book muslin, or pink silk, or bobonet lace, or anything of that
kind, when I was a doin’ hard jobs, such as makin’ soap, and runnin’
candles, and cleanin’ house, and etcetery. And when I have got to be
out in the rain when it is all drabbly and muddy, why I jest wrap up
and look like fury. But she don’t. No! I have known her time and agin
to tie the most gorgeous and shinin’ rainbow round her old waist and
jest lay herself out to look foamin’ and dressy, right there in the rain.
“It beats all how she does fix herself up. But it don’t hurt my
feelin’s at all. I never was a mite jealous of other females lookin’
better than I did. The better they look, the better I enjoy lookin’ at
’em. And if Nater can dress up better and look better while she is a
 doin’ her spring work and all
her other hard jobs than I can,
good land! how simple it would
be in me to blame her. There is
where I use such cast-iron
reason. You don’t ketch me a
blamin’ other folks for their little
personal ways and habits that
don’t do nobody no hurt. She is
well off, Nater is, and able to do
as she is a mind to; she has got
plenty to do with; she don’t
have to scrimp herself to buy
flowers, and tossels, and
rainbows. If she did, I shouldn’t
approve of it in her, not at all. I
despise folks goin’ beyond their
means to look pretty. I think it
is wicked, and the height of
dretfulness. But if them that are
abundantly able and willin’ want
to look nice, I say, let ’em look.”
And I cast a conscious and
HARD AT IT. sort of a modest glance up into
the lookin’-glass that hung over
the table. I could jest ketch a
glimpse of my head-dress, and I see that its strings floated out
noble, and I see at the same glance that he was still lookin’ witherin’
at it. But I didn’t care a mite for it. I was jest filled with my subject
(that side of it, for every subject has got more’n a dozen sides to it),
and the more he cast them witherin’ looks onto me the more I
wuzn’t withered—but soared up in mind, and grew eloquent.
And I went on fearfully eloquent about Nater, and the way she
fixed herself up perfectly beautiful—right when she was a workin’ the
hardest.
 “Why,” says I, “when she goes way down into the depths of the
under world to make iron, and coal, and salt, and things that has got
to be made, and she has got to make ’em—why, she can’t be
contented way down there in the dark, all alone by herself, without
deckin’ herself off with diamonds, and all sorts of precious gems, and
holdin’ up wreaths of shinin’ crystal, enameled fern fronds, and
hangin’ clusters snowy white, and those shinin’ with every dazzlin’
hue.
“And way down on the ocean floor, fifteen miles or so down below,
where she would naturally expect nobody would come a visatin’—
why, way down there, where she must know that there hain’t no
company liable to drop in on her onexpected, yet every minute of
the time she is all ornimented off with pearls, and opal-tinted shells,
daintest green and crimson seagrass, gem-like purple astreas,
wonderful pink and white coral wreaths—all strange and lovely
blossoms of the sea.
“What tongue can tell the wonders of the beauty she arrays
herself with way down there in the dark alone. How every little bud
of beauty is wreathed around with other marvels of loveliness—how
all about one tiny little bit of a blossom will be twined other
wonderful little flowerin’ vines, starred with crystal bells.
“No tongue can ever describe it—not mine, certainly, for I say but
little myself, and that little is far too small to express these wonders
of beauty.
 NATURE’S OCEAN BOUDOIR.

“And then right round here, when she is to work right here in our
fields, doin’ her common run of hard work—such as makin’ wheat,
and oats, and other grain. No matter how hot the weather is, or
muggy; no matter whether she is behindhand with her work, and in
a awful hurry—she always finds time to scatter along in the orderly
ranks of the grain, wild red poppies and blue-eyed asters. And I
never in my life, and Josiah never did, see her ever make a solid ear
of corn without she hung on top of it a long silk tossel. And I don’t
believe she ever made a ton of hay in the world, if she had her own
way about it, but what she made it perfectly gay with white daisies
and butter-cups.
 NATURE’S WORK.
“And all the gardens of the world she glorifies, and all the roads,
and hedges, and lanes, and by-ways. No matter how long and
crooked they are, or how tejus, she scatters blossoms of brightness
and beauty over them all.
“And clear up on the highest mountains, under the shadow of the
everlastin’ snows, she will stop to lay a cluster of sweet mountain
anemones and Alpine roses on the old bosom—for she is a gettin’
considerable along in years, Nater is. Not that I say it in a runnin’
way at all, or spiteful, or mean. But I s’pose she is older than we
have any idee of—as old agin as folks call her. But she acts young,
and looks so. She holds her age remarkable, as has been often
remarked about a person whose name was once Smith.
“Why, she acts fairly frisky and girlish sometimes. Way down in the
lowest valleys, down by the most hidden brook-side, she will sit
down to weave together the most lovely and coquetish bunches of
fern and grasses, and scarlet and golden wild flowers, and deck
herself up in ’em like a bride of 16. You never ketched her runnin’ in
debt for a lot of stuff though—her principles are too firm. But she
goes on makin’ beauty and gladness wherever she goes, and lookin’
handsome, and if it had been wicked the Lord wouldn’t have let her
go on in it. He could have stopped her in a minute if He had wanted
to. She does jest as He tells her to, and always did.
“And,” says I, with considerable of a stern look onto Kellup, “if
Nater—if she who understands the unwritten language of God, that
we can’t speak yet—if she, whose ways seem to us to be a
revelation of that will of the Most High—if she can go on wreathing
herself in beauty, I don’t think we should be afraid of gettin’ holt of
all we can of it—of all lovely things. And I don’t think,” says I, givin’ a
sort of a careless glance up into the lookin’-glass, “that there should
be such a fuss made by the world at large about my head-dress.”
“But,” says Kellup, a groanin’ loud and violent, “it is the wickedness
of it I look at. To follow the vile example of the rich. And oh! how
wicked rich folks be. How hard-hearted, how unprincipled, and vile.”
And agin he groaned, deep.
 Says I, “Don’t groan so, Kellup,” for it was truly skairful to hear
him.
Says he, “I will groan!” Says he, “The carryin’s on and
extravagance of the rich is enough to make a dog groan.”
I see I couldn’t stop his groanin’, but I went on a talkin’
reasonable, in hopes I could quell him down.
Says I, “There is two sides to most everything, Kellup, and some
have lots of sides. That is what makes the world such a confusin’
place to live in. If things and idees didn’t have but one side to ’em,
we could grab holt of that side, hold it close, and be at rest.
“But they do. And you must look on both sides of things before
you make a move. You mustn’t confine yourself to lookin’ on jest one
side of a subject, for it hain’t reasonable.”
“I won’t try to look on both sides,” says he with a bitter look. “That
is what makes folks onsettled and onstabled in their views, and
liberal. But I won’t. I am firm and decided. I am satisfied to look on
one side of a subject—on the good old orthodox side. You won’t
ketch me a whifflin’ round and lookin’ on every side of a idee.”
“Wall,” says I, calmly, for to convince, and not to anger, is ever my
theme and purpose. And knowin’ that to the multitude truth is most
often palatable if presented in a parabolical form, and has been for
centuries often imbibed by them in that way, entirely unbeknown to
them. And knowin’ that the little scenes of daily life are as good to
wrap round morals and cause ’em to be swallowed down
unbeknowin’, as peach preserves are to roll round pills, I went on
and says:
“If you won’t look on only one side of a subject, Kellup, you may
find yourself in as curious a place as Melvin Case was last fall. His
wife told it herself to Miss Gansey, and Miss Gansey told the editor of
the Augurs’es wife, and the editor of the Augurs’es wife told Miss
Mooney, and she told the woman’s first husband’s mother-in-law that
told me. It come straight.
“It was a very curious situation, and the way on’t was: Melvin
Case, as you know, married Clarinda Piller of Piller P’int, down on the
Lake Shore road. Wall, they had been married 23 years and never
had no childern, and last fall they had a nice little boy. He was a
welcome child, and weighed over 9 pounds.
“Wall, Malvin thought the world of his wife, and bein’ very tickled
about the boy, and feelin’ very affectionate towards his wife at the
time, he proposed at once that they should call him after her maiden
name—Piller. Of course she give her willin’ consent, and they was
both highly tickled. But you see, bein’ blinded by affection and
happiness, they didn’t look on only one side of the idee, and they
never studied on how the two names was a goin’ to look when they
was put together, till after he had wrote it down in the Bible; and
then he paused, with his pen in his hand, and looked up perfectly
horrified at his wife, who was holdin’ the baby in her arms and
lookin’ over his shoulder, and she looked perfectly dumbfoundered at
him, for they see it looked awful—Piller Case.
 BABY PILLER CASE.

“Now you are lookin’ at one side of the subject, but there is
another side to it, Kellup,—there is as sure as you live and breathe.
“God knows too much cannot be said or sung about the duty the
rich owe to the poor. They cannot study too correctly, and follow too
closely the pattern that He, the loving Elder Brother, set them. He
who was so tender in His compassion; so helpful and thoughtful to
the claims of the poor and humble. But charity is a big word, and it
has more than one side to it. It means charity to the poor, under
whose lowly roofs He once entered, a child of the poor, and so
consecrated them honorable for all time. Those who were His closest
friends through His toilsome earthly life; those whom He loved first,
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