Article
ID: CBB934667166

Forms of Equivalence: Bertillonnage and the History of Information Management (January 2020)

unapi
Data collection; methods Identification Information technology 19th century France Bertillon, Alphonse

Late in the nineteenth century, the French civil servant and anthropologist Alphonse Bertillon developed a system of criminal identification that sought to classify human beings on individual standardized cards, each containing a consistent set of biometric measurements and observations. This process, which came to be known as “Bertillonnage,” disassembled the visual form of the human body into small pieces of data that police forces used to individuate, and thus identify, single human beings within populations of millions. In this paper, we investigate Bertillonnage as a system that exemplified the most sophisticated approaches to organizing and retrieving data at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition, we demonstrate that the techniques it implemented—which turned on a purely functional equivalence between the operations of information systems and operations of the human mind—made thinkable a number of subsequent practices well-known to the history of information management. We argue that the physical infrastructure of Bertillonnage served as a set of grubby material practices that exercised a form of technological inertia over later information architectures. Without suggesting a direct, causal relationship, we note that certain of the imperatives and strategies that governed the history of modern digital computing, which scholars have long asserted grew out of the nineteenth-century culture of information, also structured core features of Bertillonnage.

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Authors & Contributors
Ellenbogen, Josh
Drage, Matthew
Little, Joyce Currie
Włodzimierz Gogołek
Moats, David
Jessica Pykett
Journals
History of the Human Sciences
The Bridge: Journal of the National Academy of Engineering
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Science, Technology and Human Values
Science in Context
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Publishers
University of Chicago Press
Pennsylvania State University Press
Matthiesen
IEEE
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
University of Chicago
Concepts
Data collection; methods
Information technology
Big data
Technology and society
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Computers and computing
People
Bertillon, Alphonse
Marey, Etienne Jules
Galton, Francis
Gérando, Joseph-Marie de
Time Periods
19th century
21st century
20th century, early
20th century
20th century, late
Places
France
Africa
Toronto (Ontario)
Kenya
Prussia (Germany)
Berlin (Germany)
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