This year, UCSC Special Collections has been processing the archives of the Lick Observatory and the papers of Professor Ken Norris. We look at these collections through the historical construct of the “book of nature”; we are interested in how science has treated nature as a text that can be understood through objective practices of “reading” and which must be carefully reproduced and analyzed through objective modes of graphic representation. In these archives, we witness the genesis of new technologies and methodologies for reading and recording the book of nature. We can see how scientists respond to the capacities and limitations of these new technologies and methodologies for observing and representing the natural world.

These archives also help us to account, however, for an alternate historiography of scientific observation, which considers objectivity as a constructed ideal rather than a natural capacity. We are particularly interested in how new technologies and different modes of observation generate new aesthetic ideals and knowledge formations that give shape to practices of scientific observation. As we observe astronomers and naturalists at work in these collections, we can see how objectivity is negotiated by aesthetic considerations and material practices.

1. Introduction to the Lick Observatory Archives
2. The Lick Observatory: Imaging the Cosmos
3. The Lick Observatory: Eclipse Expeditions
4. Introduction to Kenneth S. Norris Papers
5. Kenneth S. Norris Papers: Natural History in Practice
6. Kenneth S. Norris Papers: Pedagogy and Conservation
7. Connections: In Relation to Nature
8. Connections: Materials of Observation
9. Visualization of the Connections
10. Reading Nature, Observing Science