 My name is Lisa Swanstrom. I'm a associate professor in the English Department affiliated with the Digital Humanities and the Digital Matters Lab here in the Marriott Library. And we've been doing just so many wonderful things in terms of trying to get people from various departments and units on campus to come together to talk about this emerging field, to critique it, to think about ways that it might be productive, to think about its history, which is a long and storied history even though we think of it as such a recent technology. And we thought that we would benefit from having a speaker series and having different people, different expertise come to the lab and talk about their research. So before I introduce Jackie, who we're just delighted to have today, I want to let you know that a couple other events that are coming up later this month and one that's happening in early May here in the Digital Matters pop-up space. So on April 22, Hema Guevara and Karin Baumguttern from Languages will be talking about their collaborative teaching experience. They did a course on trying to map exile using digital methods through the study of literary texts. It sounds like they've had a really successful semester, so we're excited to see how that went. On that same day, Seth Keaton, who's in the Music Department, will be talking about the musical archives that he has been trying to build and organize, and I think that will also be a really fascinating event. Both of those are under the aegis of the Digital Humanities Research Interest Group, which we have been hosting throughout, well, Ketch is Ketch Ken for the past couple years, and this will continue in the fall. And if you have any ideas that you would like for us to consider, please feel free to email me, to email David, Rebecca, or Lizzie, anyone affiliated, and we'd be happy to consider those ideas. The next thing that will happen will be on May 7, also at 2 p.m., and this is a continuation of a media studies reading group that my colleague in the English Department has started. And we will be reading rogue archives for that, gathering by Abigail DeCosnick, and again, that will be May 7 at 2 p.m., and my colleague is Ann Jamison in the English Department who has gotten the ball rolling with that. So with that said, it is my pleasure today to introduce Jacqueline Wernemont, who it's one of these interesting things in D.H. I've known, quote-unquote, Jack D.A. for several years through email exchanges, through collaborations with Digital Humanities Quarterly, with various kind of distributed networks. And when I found out that her work in progress was just so interesting and rich on the topic of the way that digital technology has this long history, right, in terms of keeping track of people's lives and deaths and basic vital information, I thought that she would just be a wonderful person to bring to our campus. Her book is forthcoming with MIT Press. The book is called Numbered Lives, and she'll be talking about that today, but she's also co-editing a new collection of debates in digital humanities on feminist digital humanities, and just has an amazing body of work devoted to social justice in the digital humanities that is attentive to a wide diversity of voices, bodies, abilities, and identities. She is also a co-organizer this, I believe this year you started with Haystack as a co-organizer, co-director, yeah, with Kathy Davidson. Haystack is a fantastic research collective that really promotes networking, collaborative project management, and dialogue across the country. We're particularly interested in getting our students involved more with this organization. The last thing that I'll say is that after our talk today, we have set aside time for Jackie to chat with graduate students who have an interest in the digital humanities. So if you are a grad student interested in DH, please stick around afterward and you'll have time to chat with her. And so with all of that, please join me in welcoming Jacqueline Wernemont. Thank you, Lisa, especially not only for the introduction, but for the invite to join everyone. It's been really wonderful to have a chance over the last day and a half to talk with everybody involved with the Digital Matters Lab, and I'm super psyched that there's such a lovely turnout today, especially when the weather is so beautiful. I don't know if you all know, but it's 100 degrees today in Tempe, and so this just feels like magic. I'm like, ah, so much like fresh, cold air. I also want to acknowledge and thank Carrie Brooks for her help with logistics and arrangements getting me here and getting me lodged and things like that. So I'm going to be talking about numbered lives. It's the title of the talk here. I'm going to focus sort of on quantum mediations of gender and empire in human life, and happy to take questions about the bigger project that Lisa mentioned is a book project that will be coming out in the fall, and also some of the other kinds of work that I've done. I do a fair amount of digital art installation these days, and would be happy to talk about that as well. So as someone who has long worked on the relationships between numbers and words, I'm particularly intrigued by the theoretical purchase of mathematical concepts like those of quanta and matrices. Let me do this. The matrix, a supporting or enclosing structure first imagined as a womb and now associated with tabular mathematics, is a powerful spirit to invoke. The matrix figure appears not only in the sciences of the feminized body and mathematics, but also as a form or mold in manufacturing, as interconnecting social, political, and computational networks, as in something like a biological substrate. Matrix in many organics-based definitions is the media in which something is generated or developed. Think about the growth matrix in a Petri dish. As a generative form, the matrix is a powerful way of understanding and critiquing binary logics and simple progressive narratives. As a figure for interpretive and justice-oriented work, Vivian M. May notes that the matrix is also one of the foundational ideas in intersectional practice and theory, and I'm quoting May here. Intersectionality is about matrix thinking. Granted in a matrix logic, intersectional work focuses on simultaneous and enmeshed multiplicities, including but not limited to those of race and gender. It also entails a commitment to what May calls resistant forms of knowing and to eradicating epistemological material and structural inequality. Two commitments that I have learned from feminists of color in particular. The matrix logic of intersectional feminism considers how inequalities intermingle and emphasizes the linkages between the structural and the experiential, the material, and the discursive. Now, the context-specific matrix of my book, Numbered Lives, Life and Death in Quantum Media, is that of a long Anglo-American tradition that stretches back at least to the early part of the 16th century. I use the phrase quantum media to describe media that count or enumerate, and these media in particular are entangled with what Sarah Kember and Johanna Zilinska have called the process of human techno becoming, a perpetual process of being in, with, and amongst our technologies. And part of what I'm hoping to share with Numbered Lives is a deeper understanding of how quantum media participate in the creation and maintenance of presumed natural qualities that are then inscribed as race, gender, and or citizenship. Now, my talk today draws from the second half of my book, which focuses on quantum mediations of human life. The first half deals with quantum mediations of death. Not quite an uplifting talk in the same way, although super important. So I chose to go with life today, and I'd be happy to talk about that in the Q&A. Now, it's important for me to acknowledge that there are many other histories of counting life and death, and I don't want to suggest at all that Anglo-American quantum media can stand in for something like an ahistorical, a contextual, singular approach to counting. I don't do that. One of the structuring principles of my book is that we cannot understand Anglo-American mediations of life and death without one another. That is that we must use a matrix approach given the way that biopolitics and necropolitics are intertwined with power relations designed to know, manage, and monetize human existence in ways that are, as I suggested before, gendering, racializing, and colonizing. Now, while I'm working very much in the spirit of a Foucaultian media archeology, I don't follow Foucault's suggested epistemic break between the early modern period and the 18th century. He talks at quite some length about how the early modern period really was a fundamentally different thing, and much of his history is sort of tracing back to that schism. I instead am thinking more in terms of a matrix or ecology, and I argue that forms of the 16th and 17th century persist alongside with their disciplinary mechanisms, even as newer quantum media emerge. So numbered lives presents a robust media ecology that can and has been leveraged to know and manage bodies at different scales. Now, understanding this media matrix is important to our ability to see into or to read our 21st century quantum media, which often black box their operations by hiding things like GPS devices, gyroscopes, heart monitors, microprocessors, etc., behind spare bracelets or those elegant little square boxes on an eye watch or something like that. In addition to obscuring their technical operations, our quantum media similarly black box their long histories and previous uses through both marketing and storytelling. Now, having given you a quick overview of my methods, what I'm going to do now is talk a little bit about our contemporary context of modern quantum media, and then I'm going to jump backwards in time to discuss imperial step tracking, the move from land surveying to human activity tracking, and then to health and surveillance. So, in the contemporary moment, according to Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, quantified self, also known as QS, is an aspirational and grassroots effort, and I'm quoting Wolf here, a collaboration of users and tool makers who share an interest in gaining self-knowledge through self-tracking. In a 2009 piece for Wired magazine, often cited as inaugurating the QS movement, Wolf and Kelly reported that they, quote, suddenly noticed that many of our acquaintances were finding clever ways to extract streams of numbers from ordinary human activities, end quote. Like the 17th century clerks who kept baptism roles or compiled mortality bills that I discussed in the first half of my book, Wolf and Kelly see people transforming human activities into streams of numbers. Now, while early modern mortality bills involved an outside agent, people who were counting clerks, clergy, counting women, modern quantified self tends to be a self or machine assisted remediation of life, and both efforts define human activities, whether we're talking about the early modern version or our 21st century version, define human activities by what is or can be counted. Advertising the hope of self-knowledge through numbers and celebrating what they call a new culture of personal data, Wolf and Kelly deployed familiar rhetoric of personal ownership and agency, that is, people gather, read, and share their own data. And while it's often highly personal, I think we need to be very cognizant of the fact that today's quantified self is also highly public and highly commodified. This tension between the personal and the public in quantifying human life is crucial, I think, for understanding cultural mediations that have large-scale impacts. Take, for example, Strava Metro, a spin-off of the popular cycling tracking app Strava, which you may have heard about recently with that data leak that revealed the locations of U.S. military installations across the globe. Whoops. So, Strava Metro sells cyclists' data to city planners and engineering firms. Another example, the insurance company John Hancock often gives activity trackers to their customers as a gift. And then they use the subsequent collection of activity data in order to adjust their insurance rates for those same customers. In both of these instances, corporations are leveraging what QS movement leaders position as personal data. This isn't necessarily negative. Better traffic flows, saving money, these can both be good things. Indeed, quantification and self-tracking can be a mode of speaking back to power, as the mathematician Dr. Talithia Williams so powerfully demonstrates in her, and I'm quoting the title here, own your body's data, TED Talk. Williams leveraged mathematical expertise and statistics and her own long-standing practice of fertility tracking to push back against doctors' recommendations during the days leading up to one of her children's births. Talithia is a personal friend of mine, which is part of how I know the story, but it also shows up in the TED Talk. In a context where Williams' expertise and experience was discounted both as a woman and a black person, she was able to leverage quantification and tracking to resist silencing. Now, while this didn't persuade Williams' doctor at all, it did empower her to feel that her decision not to induce childbirth was in fact sound. Gina Neff and Don Nafis describe this kind of quantified self-knowledge as a process of discovery and debugging. While their positive terminology there suggests that the human techno becoming facilitated by quantum media remains firmly rooted in enlightenment pursuits of knowledge, this idea of discovery in particular. As Neff and Nafis note, that is really hard to say. Wow, QS participants are not simply unreflectively following advice to optimize life and health, and there are clearly ways that it's possible to use quantification to speak back to power. Nevertheless, I want to draw our attention to the fact that modern self-tracking, particularly when it's done with commercial technologies, is also surveillance. Consequently, the abstractions and embodied realities produced through quantum mediation can have negative impacts, particularly when deployed at scale or in aggregation. Furthermore, despite the rhetoric of openness and inclusivity used by Wolf and Kelly, remember this tool we all build, quantum media are not universally available, and the data sets that they produce are neither representative of Anglo-American nor global communities. They tend to be highly skewed towards white affluent men. The emphasis on personal data metrics, as well as the ethos of the QS origin story, as told by Wolf and Kelly, needs to be balanced with a recognition of the commercial and state investments in aggregating personal data for other uses. We need to acknowledge that remediations are taking place through commercial, corporate, and governmental activity tracking, essentially turning walking, breathing, the involuntary contractions of smooth muscles like the heart into a locus of marketing, market analysis, consumption, colonial capitalist development, and identity production all at once. Among the first known quantum media in early modern Europe was this device, which appears in Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus, a gathering of manuscript pages written between 1478 and 1519. Sometimes referred to as a perambulator, a way wiser, a pedometer, or an odometer, this device was not actually named in this manuscript. Instead, what we have are the three views on the device, which here resembles a wheelbarrow, and measures distance with a gear system that would drop a stone down into a counting box for every full rotation of the wheel. While da Vinci's measuring and recording device is perhaps the earliest in Europe, I want to point out that it wasn't the first non-textual quantum media. The Inca were already using the Kipu, a complex tile counting and recording system, to not only count individuals but also to record productivity in minds and keep inventory in storehouses. So a handful of years after da Vinci drew this, the way, what I'm here calling the way wiser, Jean Fernell, a French artisan and physician to Catherine de Medici, used what is generally considered the oldest known pedometer in 1525. How many of you knew pedometers dated back to 1525? Right? No. I love it. It made me so happy. So use the oldest known pedometer in 1525 to measure a degree of the meridian. Now, such a measure would allow one to compute the size of the earth, so that's what Fernell was up to. In contrast to the Pushkart style way wiser, Fernell's pedometer was linked directly to the foot action of either a horse or a human. We have a handful of remaining examples of early modern way wisers, including that of the English clockmaker Daniel DeLander, the one on the my far right, your far left, I guess. A partial artifact that I in fact own, much to my very great delight. The DeLander example is a bronze dial that includes measurements in miles, furlongs and poles. The face stands about an inch and a quarter high, presumed, so it's like about this high, so presumably to hold, it would have been set in a box and the room under that dial would have been for the clockworks essentially that were below. It's about four and a half inches in diameter, and it may well, as I just suggested, have sat embedded in a handbox like the Germanic device that's there in the middle. This piece, dated 1590, is currently held at the German National Museum in Nuremberg, and it was originally part, right, that area was originally part of the Holy Roman Empire at the time that it would have been made, which seems to have been sort of the center of way wiser innovation, including the smaller and more body friendly brass and silver cord operated way wiser that we have right here, which is by Johann Willebrand. The artistry and the materials of these devices testifies to their status as instruments for the wealthy. Made of heavy brass and silver, they are framed with elaborate floral etchings, and they capture human activity in the same kinds of interfaces usually reserved for marking time and celestial movements. Expensive, heavy, and durable, the early modern way wiser joined textual and textile tracking media in order to measure human activity, but with a very different objective. European way wisers and pedometers were initially used for cartographic work. They weren't actually interested in tracking the human body. In Royal Society proceedings and other technical publications, the pedometer or way wiser was described, and I'm quoting here, a new geographical instrument which attached to a man or a horse to a man's body or a horse's saddle used the steps to display the length of the journey one has made, end quote. Unlike the essay and devotional texts that I discuss elsewhere in my book, and which were also central to the know-thyself tradition that these devices operate in, these devices flourished not because they were interested in human activity, but rather because human and or animal motion, walking or riding, was used as a proxy to measure distance. In these cases, quantum media were leveraged as a way of making land claims, that is, transforming matters of value for emerging nation states such as the existence and control of natural resources into matters of essentially international fact. No small feat in an era where standardized measurement was not yet a reality. Now, pedometers and way wisers were central to the kind of fixing and demarcating of territory that Foucault points to as foundational to territorial systems of imperial power. While measuring land can seem relatively banal and the aesthetic appeal of early way wisers can draw rather excited attention, both the banality of the practice and the elegance of the devices obscures a fundamental truth about these media. They were instrumental, literally, to colonial occupation, to the work of quote, seizing, delimiting, and asserting control over a geographic area, of writing on the ground a new set of political and social and spatial relations. Now, this matters not only for our understanding of the politics of space in the colonial era, but also for the unpacking the cultural imaginaries that have been a constitutive part of human tracking. These imaginaries, as Achille Membe observes, and I'm quoting here, give meaning to the enactment of differential rights to differing categories of people for different purposes within the same space. To walk or ride with a pedometer or a way wiser was to engage in the production of nation, Anglo-subjecthood, and to participate in the violences that attended such production. Now, such data was further processed and remediated into textual representations, and the activities of bodies driving or carrying these media were nearly completely erased in that process and in the service of a larger national project. Take, for example, John Ogilby's posthumous Britannia, which is a 1675 publication. It's a text that's famous for its gorgeous images and maps of England, which was produced using exactly those same technologies, the way wiser and the worn or carried pedometer. Ogilby's body and its extensive activities stand behind his claim that the roads that are depicted here in the map were, quote, actually ad-measured, but as you can see that what the text illustrates is a God's eye view of the island and its infrastructure. The dedication to Charles II makes clear the value of land illustrations. The book, as Ogilby says, is designed to improve our commerce from the prime center of your kingdom, your royal metropolis. Ogilby places such commerce in a long lineage of imperial efforts to, quote, record distances through their vast extended territories exactly registered and enumerated, end quote. As it had been, Ogilby argues, for the Persian, Macedonian, and Roman empires, it was important for Britain to have a certain understanding of the scale of their empire. This was both for military and commercial purposes. A king needed to know, and this is Ogilby's line here, the scale of both peace and war and security and interest. Now Ogilby notes in the dedication that England faced significant competition in the world of quantum media and imperial becoming, most notably from France and Belgium. He had good cause to want to shore up England's credibility in this area. While measuring human activity was clearly in use in England by the later half of the 17th century, continental Europeans had been using pedometers for the purposes of land surveying throughout the 16th and 17th century. Britannia's dedication takes the mean activity of Ogilby's walking and the automated measurements of the way wiser and pedometer, and re-articulates them as a performance of the peace and prosperity of Charles II's reign. It places the imperial performance of Britain in line with the great empires of history and as a model for rival Western powers. It's a really very clear example of how human activity at the center of cartographic production at the time was quickly effaced in favor of the concerns of empire or the nation state. Ogilby's body here is simply an instrument and its entanglement with quantum media functions to certify the commercial and technological prowess of Britain. The textual media, that is the book itself, is instrumental in many ways as well. Designed to enable a reader to see the commercial and military arteries of England, maps such as these transmuted, almost an alchemical process, the base activity of the human pedometer text assemblage into arguments about the value of land for a sovereign and demonstrations of imperial power to competitors. Now to map space in the early modern period was an exercise in the production and the material realities of the early nation state. Land measurements were done in order to assess taxes, to estimate the value of royal hunting and forestry lands, to cordon off pastures and gazing lands, and to delimit territory for the purposes of laying claim to natural resources such as minerals, jewels and water. Individual human bodies like that of Ogilby walked a road across the land while the new quantifying media measured the steps of the rotation of a wheel. In some instances, and I haven't found one of these yet, but man, do I want to, right? These devices even printed their data out in these little spools of punctured paper that was meant to be laid over the map so that they could sort of double check their distances. I must find myself one of these. I have been searching but have not yet found it. These measurements were then taken and they were integrated into official state and imperial documents that declared terrestrial spaces as part of an ever-expanding empire. Royal Decrees, official record books and newly popular books of maps remediated measurements of human travel into demonstrations of dominion and fiscal ownership and responsibility. I'll just mention very quickly that Molly Farrell has a really excellent study of how similarly colonial plantation islands were mapped and remediated in the 17th century. In my book, I talk about this process at length for the American colonies. So once worn on the body, the pedometer essentially automated counting, relieving the bearer of having to actively measure distances traveled. Along with automation, such devices also made meaning about the wearer themselves. This is a trade card advertising Spencer and Perkins pedometer slash way wisers. They use both terms, which makes clear that the objects were designed for men of means and were of a piece with other items of conspicuous consumption at the time such as fine watches. Spencer and Perkins were themselves London makers of watches, pedometers and way wisers who were in business in London between 1765 and 1806. Among the first to broadly sell and advertise if not also create the wearable way wiser, Spencer and Perkins forever transformed the relationships between people in their movement, activity and distance measuring. So this sort of inaugurates a new form of human techno becoming. It's like one of the sort of parallel threads. The media matrix became more complex with a shift from the mid-19th century. So prior to the mid-19th century, you have an emphasis on land productivity and the use of the way wisers to measure land productivity and control. And then at the beginning of the, I would say like after the first 25 years of the 19th century, you then get interest in tracking human populations. You get an increased interest in things like the census and other media of counting human life. So part of what the cartographic pedometer had you, sorry, part of what the cartographic pedometer had normalized was the erasure of the human body and its work even as such media depended on that human labor. While devices vary in detail, they almost all depend on what's known as aesthetic rationality. This is Timothy Reese's phrase that I use quite extensively in my book. And the aesthetic rationality is performed by spare numerical interfaces and seemingly objective measurements of steps or miles. And it's a kind of way of, aesthetic rationality is a way of describing the complex monumental meaning that can be mastered mathematically and controlled. And so it takes things that seem too big for the human mind, renders them subject to mathematics and numbers, and then makes them seem elegant and spare. Once in place, the established schema of mechanical step tracking quickly elided the ways in which colonial logics like ownership and enclosure, commercial connection, rights of state and military boundaries were both integrated in and normalized by the use of step tracking media in their outputs, right? This doesn't necessarily look like empire. This doesn't necessarily look like control, right? And yet, part of my argument is that it is. So this schema was then carried over as pedometers became a part of monitoring humans in addition to land. In 1777, William Frazier, a royal watchmaker, began to sell his devices to those who had the means to keep and buy them. While measuring land remained important, late 18th century shops like Frazier's created new pedometer usages that focused on measuring and making people, largely men, although that will change as you'll see in a bit. In an 18th century advertisement that's roughly contemporary, Frazier offers what he calls the quote, New Pedometer, which combined a step counter and a compass in a single case. Frazier's pedometer was marketed, and I'm quoting Frazier here, as an agreeable companion to gentlemen who walk much and are fond of shooting, as it will assure them, because they need this, it will assure them of the distance passed over from one place to another. So essentially Frazier is making the argument there for distance mapping as gentlemanly behavior, bringing the imperial control of land into elite personal practice. Now, in addition to finding bearing in distances, Frazier's device sold as a mechanical aid to a doctor's prescription. And again, I'm quoting Frazier here. One advantage peculiar to this machine is that those who buy the advice of their physicians are under the restraint of taking exercise to a certain degree within doors, or otherwise, may have it ascertained by use of this machine. Thus Frazier's new pedometer served two functions. One, it could measure distance, or the land, and situate the wearer's body therein, and it tracked, in addition to that sort of gentlemanly function, it could track the activity of a body in motion that was in a circumscribed space within doors, right? So you have like this gentlemanly hunting vigorous behavior, and then you've got this kind of like invalid house-convined behavior, and the pedometer is imagined as being able to measure both. This second function is no longer about understanding where a body is in topographical space or as a proxy for land measurement and territorial power. In this new usage, the pedometer was refigured as a way of mediating a person in terms of health, health measured in steps taken, and distances traveled. The gentleman hunter may well have wanted to display his fine pedometer while out, where it could be taken as a sign of conspicuous consumption, as seen with an array of mathematical instruments in the period. The patient who was confined indoors, however, circulated the pedometer in a very different context. One where it was assigned both of infirmity and of wealth sufficient to support both a doctor and a house big enough that you needed to count the steps while walking around it. With Frasier's new pedometer, we see a slow but marked addition to the ways in which the pedometer partakes in human becoming. What began as a way of mediating the relationship of human ownership and topography usually at a distance from individual bodies also became a way of mediating individual bodies and their relationships to activity, place, and health. The complex matrix of imperial power and individual health monitoring with pedometers can't be untangled. Imperial power and personal health are now pretty deeply entwined. That entanglement is perhaps best exemplified by what is known as Napoleon's repeating watch. An 18 karat gold encased mechanism that had three dials, one for time, one for step measuring, and one for the days of the month. A history of the pieces captured in the proceedings of the numismatic and antiquarian society of Philadelphia, which notes that, quote, Napoleon one had a watch which wound itself up by means of a weighted lever, which at every step that he made rose and fell. While the creation for the device is unknown, the creation date, its provenance indicates that it was purchased sometime between 1810 and 1815, which would make it the first pedometer to not need a direct link to the human body. And just to make sure that everyone understands what I mean by this, the previous pedometers would have been worn like in a jacket pocket or on the pants in some way, and they had a cord, right? So it would have been sitting in the pocket, think about that square one, and a cord would have attached to that little hook, and it would have anchored at the hip, the knee, and the ankle, right? And so it was like mechanically moved by the stepping action of the person. Same thing was true for a horse, right? It was on the saddle of the horse, and it would have linked to the leg of the horse and advanced that way. With the Napoleon pedometer, it began to be unlinked from the human body and was instead a gravity mechanism, right? So there's a weighted lever that goes up and down with the foot strike, with the footfall. Well, let's see. All right, benefiting or befitting the outsized ego of Napoleon, the device places time, date, and human activity in a single frame, rendering the body on the same plane with that of the great ordering forces of nature, diurnal and annual time. Now reports in the proceedings suggest that this device was specifically meant to surveil the French emperor, and I'm quoting here. The Napoleon watch was made by order of the physician of the emperor. The object of the register was to know precisely how much exercise was taken, as the patient was always shirking his duty in this matter of his daily outing. And it's worth noting, right, that lever had two functions, one which was articulated to Napoleon, which was simply to wind his watch for him, right? But his physician had ordered it made so that he could monitor how much the patient was actually out walking, right? So it's already a kind of surveillance technology. So even as Napoleon may well have used the pedometer in operations of territorial power, he was also subject to its monitoring capacity. The emperor's body may well have been elevated to the level of celestial tracking and knowledge, but it was also subject to the ordering and measuring functions that extended the knowledge enterprise from the natural world into the individual body, a move that was essentially designed to enable his doctor to monitor his patient's compliance. Now Napoleon's pedometer was purported to be the only one of its kind, and it may well have been, and that by which I mean with the weighted lever mechanism, until London watchmaker William Payne of Payne and Company patented his improved pedometer in 1831. Described in the 1831 edition of the London Journal of Arts and Sciences, Payne's pedometer discarded the temporal functions of Napoleon's watch in favor of what he described as a very simple construction. Made in the form of a small flat pocket watch, the escapement of the pedometer is made by the vibratory movement of a weighted lever, so that's what I was talking about with the Napoleon, which is put in motion by the rising and falling of the body, and walking or in riding horseback, independent of any spring or strap attached to the part of the body as pedometers in the old construction. Like earlier tethered pedometers, Payne's pedometer could be modified for use on horseback or in a carriage, and in a nod to women's fashion could be made, and I'm quoting Payne here, so small as to be contained in a lady's locket or added to a small watch. Another thing that I haven't yet found is one of these ones that was specifically designed for women. Anybody ever runs into one of those? Let me know. While women's use was possible, the patent report clearly marks this as an elite masculine device. Quote, it is intended to be worn by gentlemen in the waistcoat pocket or in a common watch pocket. Unlike Napoleon's watch, which placed his body in the same schema as the passage of time, most 19th century pedometers had a single escapement, that is the mechanism to check and release the weighted lever, and face, measuring only steps. This formal change simultaneously pulled the human body out of a celestial context, and at the same time suggested that human activity warrants its own tracking media, rendering the masculine activities of the gentlemen bearer perhaps less significant cosmically, but now worthy of its own dedicated and fine surveillance tool. Not to be outdone by the English scientific American published an account of an American pedometer in its April 1918-79 issue, which as far as my research can ascertain is the first American-made pedometer. And you can see the style is quite different, right? It has this sort of swirling nautilus face as opposed to the more common watch face. Now the account suggests that 19th century Americans were specifically interested in tracking for individual health and recreation. I'm quoting here, walking, especially in the open air, is acknowledged to be the most economical, the most enjoyable, and in many respects the most healthful form of exercise. Sound familiar? That was a long time ago, but not so different. Now pulling apart the collapse that was performed in and by British and European pedometers, American inventor Benjamin Church argued that the pedometer, quote, made abroad, so he's talking about the ones in England and Europe, were for surveyors' uses, and they have failed to meet the wants of walkers generally, end quote. Using the same weighted lever mechanism as seen in Payne's pedometer, Church's device incorporated a novel face that spirals around a fixed arm, mirroring the nautilus-like spiral that's etched in the metal face. In addition to its pleasing aesthetics, the design on the face was created to solve a problem that other pedometers had struggled with, that is to keep tracks over long distances efficiently. The whirls allow one to track more than 12 miles at a time, or 10, somewhere only 10 in the European versions, but the different whirls allow for a much expanded tracking distance. Now interestingly, patented in 1877, the American pedometer was sold exclusively by Tiffany and company. Two versions were initially available, one for adult men and another adapted, quote, for ladies and children. While Church touted his device as inexpensive and ads ran regularly suggesting, quote, ladies, professionals, and businessmen, students, pedestrians, sportsmen, farmers, surveyors, and others, will find it very useful. The $5 to $7 purchase price is roughly equivalent to a $100 or $150 device today. Then, as now, the affordability of quantum media was a quite relative measure. According to a National Research Council report, between the American Civil War and the 20th century, there was a, quote, marked shift in surveillance operating as an informal practice based in religious dogma to becoming an embryonic tool of the government. So part of what I'm going to do here is argue that we still don't get away from that kind of governmental entanglement. In this context, the pedometer became a tool for both governance and a characteristically Anglo-American religious watchfulness. As the 1841 Ohio Democratic Standard suggests, and I'm quoting here, this is an important article for livery stablekeepers and, if used, would settle many disputes as to the distances run by their vehicles. By the mid-19th century, the same media that had been favored by kings and emperors were now being deployed in a matrix of individual labor and professional accountability in order to address a very different set of needs in the U.S. Rather than certifying an empire using a pedometer and maps, what I might call imperial and distant certification, excuse me, the livery pedometer example is one of a kind of close certification of honesty or the lack thereof of an individual in a marketplace. Now, this close certification was a market niche that the pedometer was particularly well suited to fill. Built on the familiar model of the pocket watch, already entangled in emerging health discourses and using a relatively simple mechanism, the pedometer was easily repurposed from large-scale mapmaking to the measurement of individual activity. Now, to get a sense of who and what was worth watching in this new usage, consider the following anecdote, which ran in the December 22, 1860 edition of the Viscine's Gazette, an Indiana weekly newspaper. A lady who had read of the extensive manufacturer of odometers to tell how far a carriage had been run said that she wished that some Connecticut genius would invent an instrument to tell her how far husbands had been in the evening when they supposedly just stepped down to the post office or went out to attend a caucus, end quote. Now, while the Indiana woman seemed to not know that such devices were in fact already available, a Boston woman managed to perform exactly the kind of surveillance for which the Indiana woman had wished. According to a report in the 1879 Hartford Daily Courant, a Boston wife softly attached a pedometer to her husband when after supper he started to go down to the office to balance the books. On his return, 15 miles of walking were recorded. He had been stepping around the billiard table all evening. Now, such surveillance was not limited to domestic relationships. The Washington Evening Star ran a story in the fall of 1895 in which an admiral gave his junior watch officers what looked to them like a common pocket watch but was really a pedometer. The admiral tracked the junior officer's night watch activities. To the admiral's dismay, the morning readings showed just two and a half miles traversed overnight, suggesting that the ensigns had been sleeping or resting during most of their watch. The next night, those same ensigns ordered an apprentice to take that watchful pedometer and shake it violently for four hours while they slept. While the hack worked, insofar as the pedometer registered more miles traveled, it was perhaps a little bit too effective. A distance of 89 miles traversed in 12 hours tipped the admiral off to the ruse. Now, these late 19th-century hacks precede our own 21st-century example of unfit bits, a performance hack of corporate and insurance surveillance of human activity. As the pedometer became a vector for surveillance by those in power, people who were able quickly developed hacks designed to frustrate such efforts. There was little need to have hacked the pedometer when it was in service of, say, map-making in the Imperial project. That was already a kind of hack of previously existing notions of boundary, domain, land ownership, and rights. As the pedometer began to mediate lives rather than land, however, the impacts and risks shifted to the individual being measured, who might well face domestic discord or the loss of a job. Now, Hannibal Jackson, one of the husbands, as his story suggests, by the late 19th-century quantum media tracking of human activity was not only tied to a particular human body, it also remediated these largely white male elite bodies in ways that were linked to health and or labor activities rather than or in addition to land mapping. By the late 19th century, there was a marked uptick in newspaper reports of activity tracking as part of health and recreation in the U.S. In the last quarter of the 19th century, large outlets like Scientific American, as well as more local publications like the Elk County Advocate and the Lake County Star all ran stories on the health benefits of walking with a pedometer. Various athletic clubs and physicians appear in the papers throughout the last decade of the 19th century, each using the pedometer to track wearer's activities for the purposes of self-reporting fitness or health. A new context for what had initially been a device used for surveying land was now firmly established. Pedometers could mediate both, and this is sort of that parallel run that I'm talking about, as opposed to Foucault's break. These things coexist. Pedometers could mediate both the ongoing land acquisition of the United States government and the trustworthiness and health of individual white citizens. In taking on the certification functions previously handled, and this is elsewhere in my book, previously handled in essays and devotional accounts, the pedometer rendered the Christian foundations of textual mediations of trust and reputation less visible. So again, we have a kind of erasure or black boxing of some of the ideology behind the device. While the conceptual schema of the life log, virtue tracking, or the reflective essay is clearly at work in 19th century pedometer usages to attest to individual labor, health, and trustworthiness, the deceptively simple numerical interface essentially black boxes that entire history. Now, while much of the popular discussion of early 19th century pedometers focuses on men's use, in the second half of the century, the device has become a part of white women's fashion in close surveillance as well. The Atlanta Daily Constitution announced in 1879, quote, a pedometer is now an indispensable feature of every young lady's attire, right? In a piece titled A Slap at the Dancing Girl that ran in the LA Times in the spring of 1890, a girl who was described as frail and consumptive, so ill that she was unable to wash dishes, was sent to a local dance by her father in a coach with two servants and a pedometer slipped into her pocket. As the paper reported, quote, when she got home in the morning, it indicated she had danced enough to cover 31 miles. Echoing but inverting earlier textual accounts of women's behavior that I talk about in my book, the story suggested that the tracking device had revealed the untrustworthiness of the young woman. Step tracking was also used to certify the birth of Von Hilleran's 1879 89-mile competitive walk, which reportedly, quote, aroused in women a sort of infatuation to go on the tramp wherever she travels. According to one report, wherever Bertha goes, women begin to straighten themselves up and feel the muscles of the calves in their legs. Now the slap story and that of Von Hilleran stand at two ends of the poles of the rhetoric of 19th century white women's pedometer usage. On the one hand, we have close surveillance in the example of the consumptive girl and a quick moral and medical evaluation of her based on her activities. On the other, Von Hilleran's story evokes both the growing popularity of pedestrianism as a sport and the conspicuous consumption and performance that was enabled by wearing a pedometer during sport. Both are also framed by the gendered expectations around health and activity at the end of the 19th century. Now in Von Hilleran's story, we hear anxiety and excitement around the increasing relative autonomy of white women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as a suggestion that women's bodies, those calves in particular, had been dormant and they could be improved with physical exercise. In the story of the consumptive girl, domestic duties were reasserted as more valuable to her father than her social or physical activities. In both, the pedometer stands in as a technology able to reveal to anxious men the moral status of a woman being surveilled. Von Hilleran can tramp as long as it's in the service of a competitive sport. The consumptive girl, by contrast, is revealed to be someone more like a sexualized tramp, unworthy as a contributor to the household economy and dangerously prolific in her physical interactions with men. Now merging the anxieties of both of the proceeding stories are the ambivalent reports of women's pedometer usage at the turn of the century in context of elite socialite cultures. In the 1908 Washington Times magazine ran a section, it was in fact a two page spread, on the pedometer fad at debutante balls, which included a nearly full page graphic that featured elegantly clad women with pedometers discreetly hidden beneath expensive gowns or tucked into their bodices. The text at the bottom of the report, text at the bottom reports that quote, after an evening at a ball, the debutante can glance at her little pedometer and say to her escort in all truthfulness, well, I danced just 21 miles this evening. The piece goes on to suggest the pedometers all the rage in the cities having been imported from the London debutante scene, suggesting quote, no bud is truly elite unless she has a little ticker attached to her bodice. And also that if one is close enough to the young debutante, one can hear the merry tick, tick, tick of the little instrument. The description is clearly meant to titillate in addition to standing as evidence of women's status as nationally prized buds, presumably destined to help the nation flower. It at once positions a quantum media as a necessary accessory for cultural prominence and it promises men an auditory experience that verifies their physical proximity to the nation's desirable crop. The article goes on to note, quote, the facts shown by the figures may well be incredible, but they are true. Again, depending on the power of quantum media to contain the incredible with the deft remediation of aesthetic rationalism. Now while the presidents of the pedometer positions young women as cosmopolitan, elite, and desirable even in their labors unlike that consumptive girl, a cartoon that appeared five years later in the Richmond Times Dispatch suggests that the step-counting craze threatened the social networking and partnering function of the balls as the women became more fixated on the numbers than on their dancing partners. Lamenting the spoiling of the dance season by the craze, the cartoon in the article to which it was attached suggested that instead of the appropriate work of nation and family building, the pedometer wearing women were creating a spectacle in which the debutante is anxiously monitoring her steps while her dance partner sweats with exertion. While competitive walking helped to frame and certify von Hilleren's tramping in terms of national prestige, the pedometer-driven competition amongst the nation's debutantes threatened to transform balls into sporting events that leveraged men's physical exertion in dancing rather than serving their matrimonial or sexual desires. Okay, so what I've done today is a kind of performance of the matrix method, bringing together items from across time and space in order to build not a teleological narrative, but instead a kind of collection from which we can generate particular kinds of histories. Layered in here is also an attention to particular contexts, the matrices in which these human techno-becomings are taking place. There is clearly a historical trajectory, but it is one of layering and weaving rather than displacement or fall. The British Empire depended on pedometers to automate distance measurement in order to make arguments about state rights, sovereignty and ownership, and the vigor of the nation both home and in the colonies. Late 18th century developments initially layered health monitoring along with those of land measurement, in the case of, say, the Napoleon watch. But then you get the sort of invention, as it were, of the simpler and cheaper devices of the Fraser and American pedometers. So even as usage and form shifted, the certification functions remained in place. They took on new subjects, patients, livery drivers, husbands, daughters, pedestrians, debutants, right? So it's like the media sort of spread out. Each of these is a different but related mode of human techno-becoming. The monitoring of the young Connecticut girl is connected to the anxiety over the over-competitive debutants. In both, the pedometer is part of the construction of the feminized body, which cannot demonstrate too much vigor in the wrong places. By contrast, young men were encouraged to be unrestrained and often decidedly unproductive in their pedometer-monitored excursions. Now my goal in telling these stories is to challenge the black-boxing of modern quantified self-discourse and quantum media devices to bring the many histories of activity tracking back into view when we consider 21st century devices in their uses. From this vantage point to me, it comes as no surprise that these corporate entities are collecting our purportedly personal data. It's always been this way. Quantum media have also always been a central part of how people articulate what it means to be an Anglo-American man, woman, girl, boy. Now the gender binary is built in there. That's a whole other talk. Similarly, it is of little surprise that the media entangled in the long history of elite subjecthood would be sold today as decidedly upper middle-class lifestyle accessories. Or that the optimization of health performance of tracking might be wrapped up in Enlightenment modes of rationality and its anesthetics. In modernity at large, Arjunapadurai observes, quote, and this is the quote that was at the very beginning of my talk, statistics are to bodies and social types, what maps are to territories. They flatten and enclose. I think he's right that statistics, along with other quantum mediations, can and have done this, particularly those developed to respond to the needs. My hope is that understanding the histories, the desires, power relations that are hidden behind those smooth, spare interfaces and rational numbers will help us actually choose how we become with our quantum media. Thank you. All right, thank you, Jackie. We have time for maybe one or two questions. I want to be respectful of people's times. And please wait for the mic to get to you before you ask your questions. We'd like to go first. We have conversations with grad students, too. Great. Sorry. I was a little out of the loop at the beginning. Is your book already out? Okay. November. And how do we get in the know for when it will be released and how to buy it? So it'll be through MIT Press. So it'll be in their fall catalog. You can look online. You can follow me on Twitter. I'm at Prof Ordemont, the bottom of all the slides. I'll definitely be touting it then. Okay, thank you. We'll make sure to order at least one copy in the library, too. I appreciate that. Thank you. Well, I have a question for you, Jackie. You know, I was thinking about when you were talking about the sort of measurement and the quantification of movement. I was thinking about Taylorism. And I was thinking about how there's always been this kind of pressure for bureaucracy and for employers to want to measure efficiency. So I was wondering if that figures into what you're talking about, because Taylorism is about employers sitting there with stopwatches literally measuring employees' movements and with cameras, seeing if they're being efficient with their movements and if they're maximizing their time. So I was wondering if that kind of figures into what you're talking about. It's not just walking around with stopwatches, but it seems like there's a way there. Oh, for sure. And one of the things that's really hard about talking about this project is that I have too many things, right? And that was hard writing the book, too. But in the book, I was able to get all of it in, right? Because you don't have to worry about, like, people's afternoons. So in the two chapters that are on quantified life, I discuss how the pedometer was something that was attached to traveling salesmen, to railroad workers, to post office workers. So it's attached to a huge range of people precisely in order to surveil workers and to think about optimization of routes. It's also, there's a section in there where I talk about women's uptake of the pedometer in, like, home economics discourse. And at first, I was like, oh, this is great. There are women who are like doing these university studies and, like, this is maybe a different kind of use. Turns out it was actually an argument made to get women who had gone out of the workplace to go back home. So it was a way of demonstrating that a housewife actually did a lot of work, not as a way of recognizing women's labor at home, but as a way of getting women who had gone out into the workforce to go back home and feel productive in some way. So it's definitely there. There are discussions of nurses' footfalls, right? And so one of the things that I couldn't talk about today is the way in which the accuracy of pedometers, even today, is really gendered, right? So there are a set of studies that happen in the early part of the 19th century where they give pedometers to nurses and flight attendants and they want to see how far they're going in a day, but then they complain that women walk too softly, and so they don't actually get good measurements, right? And they call it the nurses' step, right? And that's somehow an index of the fact that women, like, aren't stomping hard enough during their day. So it's definitely wrapped up in those sort of Taylorist efficiency models. It even extends into how people start doing animal husbandry. They put pedometers on cows to figure out when they're fertile, because they have different movement patterns when they're fertile, so it becomes a part of, like, you know, the farm industry. It's just like the pedometers everywhere when you start looking. It's very strange, but definitely tied to this, like, interest in efficiency, workplace efficiency, etc. that we see today, for sure, also. Great, thank you. Let's thank Jackie for her talk, please. APPLAUSE