A New Wave of Prosopography: an Application to Tide Prediction Machines

My Master’s degree research project concerns the history and development of analogue tide prediction machines. In this presentation I explain the motivations, the science and the technology behind the development of tide prediction machines. I also introduce the novel approach to prosopography I applied as the methodology to study tide prediction machines, and how I used digital humanities tools to do so.

I gave this 20-minute presentation at the Oceanext 2019 conference (within La Mer XXL exhibition) at Nantes Exhibition Centre on 4 July 2019.

Abstract: Tide Prediction Machines (TPMs) are analogue computers that were used to predict the times of high and low tides worldwide from the end of the 1800s up to the digital age. The first TPM was designed by William Thomson and built in London in 1873. It was developed as a response to increasing pressure from commercial shipping lines towards the middle of the 19th century who wanted a greater number of more accurate tidal predictions more quickly than could be calculated by hand. As well as helping shipping lines and navies to safely navigate the seas and the shores, TPMs became crucial to the building of ports and effective flood defences. A total of 25 of the 33 TPMs ever built were constructed in the UK but were then shipped to other countries who wanted to do their own calculations. Although analogue TPMs are no longer in use, most still exist today either in storage or as museum pieces across the world [1].

The methodological approach proposed is part of the research work developed at the Centre François Viète in Brest, in collaboration with the Centre Européen de Réalité Virtuelle (CERV) on the subject of “comparative history of maritime cultural landscapes and digital humanities” [2] (Brest, Venice, Argentina, Chile, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Iles du Ponant).

In this project, the maritime landscape is considered as a Large Technological System (LTS) according to a definition proposed T. P. Hughes [3]. A temporal evolution model of these landscapes focussed on human activity and called ANY-ARTEFACT has been developed from Bird's geographical ANYPORT model [4]. It is based on the choice of artefacts as characteristic indicators of human activity linked, for example, to mobility (bridges, cranes, etc.) or industrial production (forges, rope mills, etc.) [5]. The work in progress presented here concerns the activity of producing data with TPMs for a wide range of users.

Prosopography is a research approach usually used by historians to study the lives of groups of people [6]. Human activity is studied according to three main axes: the material system of artefacts, the actors, and the knowledge involved. The 33 machines form a coherent group in which each artefact can be described by its “life cycle” (i.e. a time evolution cycle modelled from ANY-ARTEFACT). Given the analogies with human groups, the research hypothesis is that it is possible to apply prosopographic methods to analyse the “life cycle” of TPMs, from the motivation for producing them to their decommissioning and their status today.

Diverse digital humanities tools are being used to associate, visualise and interpret the data, thereby distinguishing particular characteristics representative of TPMs. The aim is to find and analyse the common features in the lives of TPMs, which will give an appreciation of their importance, the extent of their use and usefulness, and an impression of the shape of their “lives”.

This ongoing work is part of a collaboration with the SHOM (Brest) and the Musée des Arts et Métiers (Paris). It is also part of the research areas of the GIS d'Histoire Maritime [7] and the Data for History Consortium [8].

[1] Philip Woodworth, An inventory of tide prediction machines (Southampton: National Oceanography Centre, 2016), http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/513660.

[2] Sylvain Laubé, Ronan Querrec, Marie-Morgane Abiven and Serge Garlatti, “Lab In Virtuo : Un environnement Virtuel Intelligent (EVI) participatif dédié à l'histoire et aux patrimoines des paysages culturels industriels,” (presented at #dhnord2018: Matérialités de la recherche en sciences humaines et sociales, Lille, October 2018), 〈hal-01950624〉.

[3] Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds., The social construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1989).

[4] The Geography of Transport Systems, “The Evolution of a Port (The Anyport Model),” accessed 28 March 2019, https://transportgeography.org/?page_id=3388.

[5] See thesis works of Bruno Rohou, https://brmdp.hypotheses.org, and Marie-Morgane Abiven, https://brestvenise.hypotheses.org.

[6] Koenraad Verboven, Myriam Carlier and Jan Dumolyn, “A Short Manual to the Art of Prosopography,” in Prosopography Approaches and Applications: A Handbook, ed. Katharine. S. B. Keats-Rohan (Oxford : University of Oxford Linacre College Unit for Prosopographical Research, 2007), 35–69, https://prosopography.history.ox.ac.uk/images/01%20Verboven%20pdf.pdf.

[7] GIS d'Histoire Maritime, “GIS d'histoire maritime,” accessed 28 March 2019, http://www.histoire-maritime.org.

[8] Data for History, “Data for History Consortium,” accessed 28 March 2019, http://dataforhistory.org.