[Taxacom] Macroscope - history of the term

[Tony Rees]

Sorry, a stray full stop got attached to the link provided, meaning it will
not work... correct is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroscope_(science_concept)

Regards - Tony


On Wed, 4 Aug 2021 at 05:50, Tony Rees <tonyrees49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> In these times of Covid, how about a little detective work?
>
> When I was working with OBIS/Census of Marine Life in the early 2000s, I
> would hear Jesse Ausubel on occasion use the term "macroscope" to describe
> an all-encompassing view, e.g. of life in the oceans, or for the Barcode of
> Life project, or the Encyclopedia of Life, and I liked the term - I believe
> he was stimulated either by reading Joël de Rosnay's 1975 French book of
> the same name, or Howard Odum's work on ecology from 1971 - some ecologists
> still use the term "the view through Odum's macroscope" or similar, when
> talking about analysis of large scale ecological patterns.
>
> A few months back (or perhaps more by now) I decided that this term needed
> its own article in Wikipedia since one was lacking, since I occasionally
> encountered the term again in more recent reading. Creating the
> Wikipedia article (cited below) involved researching the history of the
> term, and I came up with three prior uses to Odum's 1971 book (courtesy of
> Google Scholar - not to be confused with the Wild/Leica instrument of the
> same name, designed for macro photography of specimens in a laboratory) -
> going backwards, by psychiatrists W.H. Hargreaves and K.H. Blacker who
> wrote in 1966: "The advent of the electronic digital computer is causing a
> revolution in the behavioral sciences comparable to the impact the
> microscope had on biology. Like the microscope, the computer provides a
> view that is beyond the capability of the naked eye. The computer is being
> used as a "macroscope," which enables us to perceive relationships based on
> larger patterns of information than we are otherwise able to integrate."
>
> Then by historian Philip Bagby in 1959: "[Someone should] invent a
> 'macroscope', an instrument which would ensure that the historian see only
> the larger aspects of history and blind him to the individual details."
>
> And finally by geographers Lawrence M. Sommers and Clarence L. Vinge who
> wrote in 1957: "What do we see? What are the inter-relationships that exist
> among the observed features? The near-views can, by means of mapping, be
> resolved with over-the-horizon views, and the map becomes a "macroscope" to
> help us understand the spatial organization of the Earth's phenomena."
>
> So my question is, can anyone come up with any earlier use/s of the term,
> in the context as discussed, suitable for inclusion in the Wikipedia
> article, which is at
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroscope_(science_concept)...
>
> PS a search of BHL gives the following intriguing snippet in a magazine
> article from 1895(!!) issue of "Forest and Stream": "The microscope has
> opened up the world of little things as the macroscope has opened up the
> world of great things, and, though both go an infinite distance beyond the
> scope of man's vision, instead of bringing him nearer the end, they but
> immensely enlarge the beginning." (found at
> https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/43344450) - so maybe there is
> something out there...
>
> Regards to all - Tony Rees, Australia - compiler of my own "macroscope",
> www.irmng.org
>
> Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
> https://about.me/TonyRees
>