#multiple discovery

It's Fine Press Friday!

Multiple Discovery is a 2022 project produced in an edition of 50 copies by the five letterpress printers who make up the collaborative group, Shift-Lab: Katie Baldwin, Denise Bookwalter, Sarah Bryant, Macy Chadwick, and Tricia Treacy. The colophon describes their process:

Multiple Discovery (2022) occurs when innovations are made independently and simultaneously in different locations. Shift-lab uses Multiple Discovery as a metaphor for our own remote collaborative practice. Working with a common horizon line and color palette, we each developed imagery for this artist book in separate studios. Printed sheets were then exchanged in batches of ten. Individually, we wrote and printed text gathered from a shared collection of source material that was collated and folded into a unique set of ten copies.

Since we collect all the work of Sarah Bryant, we hold one of the ten copies printed by her (numbers 21-30; we hold #25). The entire edition, however, is signed by all five artists.

View more posts with work by Sarah Bryant.

...with the fact that, these days on most standard computers, you can put spaces in filenames?

...with the fact that you can put more than 8 letters/numbers in a filename?

...with the fact that most of the time, typing the file extension while naming a file is not necessary unless you’ve specifically set things up that way or it’s one of those “filetype determined by extension” saves in specific programs like GIMP?

Because I have trouble with all of these.  I am getting better (I just named an entire series of files “Igor head snuggle 01″ etc. without trying to type .jpg at the end, without eliminating the spaces or replacing them with dashes or underscores, and without saving it as IGRHSN01.JPG or IGORHD01.JPG or IGORHEAD.JPG or something.)  But it feels wrong, and I’m still ridiculously efficient at figuring out how to condense things down to 8 letters or fewer.

And don’t get me started on what directories got called on a GUI.  (Our first major computer was an Amiga 1000 so I still have a weird tendency to think of them as “drawers”, something that never really took off the way “folders” did.)  Or the fact that GUIs are the norm, and that there are avid computer users who have never seen or heard of a command line in their life.  And watch-sized computers (calculator watches -- with individual buttons -- were the nerd equivalent when I was a kid).

Or the fact that our first-ever computer stored files on tapes (like the same kind of tape you taped music on, which also doesn’t happen much these days it seems, although at least people still know tapes exist).  Or when floppy disks were usually floppy (and when they were seemingly rigid, they were just keeping the floppy bits inside and invisible), and most computers didn’t have hard drives.  Or modems.  And USB wasn’t a thing so every type of computer had a different configuration of pins for peripherals to plug in(1).  Or when all web pages were written by hand in text editors.  

Or just... argh.  I feel like my brain can’t keep up with technology anymore, even cars freak me out.(3)  Especially the new kind that don’t have keys.  I mean on the one hand it’s cool living in The Future, but in other ways my brain just can’t keep up with what technology exists let alone how to use or even coexist with some of it.  And seriously 37 (or really 36 I think, it’s 37 in August, I’m also losing count of birthdays these days so I go by year -- when I can remember the year -- and then get confused) isn’t that old.

(Photos from that Igor series coming up by the way, they’re adorable.)

(1)  Which was obnoxious enough that my dad designed something akin to USB -- but never went to the trouble of marketing or patenting it.  Which makes me imagine that tons of people were inventing similar things at the same time.  

If that confuses you, see multiple discovery/simultaneous invention.  a.k.a. also the same thing (that people’s ignorance of pisses me off about) when people start fighting over who “really” coined a word or phrase when I can vividly remember multiple simultaneous (or non-simultaneous but without having ever heard of each other) coinings.  When a concept or invention is necessary and two or more people have very similar situations, background knowledge, etc., then two or more people are very likely to come up with the exact same word, invention, etc., without having known each other.  

Famous example:  The word autism, originally coined by Bleuler to describe a symptom for his also-newly-coined diagnostic term schizophrenia, was picked up and changed in meaning almost exactly simultaneously by Kanner and Asperger to describe two almost completely overlapping(2) groups of kids they were working with.  They had roughly the same background, the same training, and the same social and cultural circumstances that made certain people stand out who hadn’t stood out that often before, so they slapped the same name on us while (for many reasons) emphasizing slightly different aspects of who we were.

(2) No, really, there are a lot of myths about both groups of kids that cause people to assume they were wildly different.  They weren’t.  Kanner’s patients were usually far more capable (speech, college, etc.) than people who’ve never read him assume they were, and Asperger’s patients were sometimes (including speech delays) less capable than people who have and haven’t read him assume (he emphasized and sometimes distorted their capabilities and downplayed their difficulties to save them from Nazi eugenics).  There are people in Asperger’s original writings who would meet DSM-IV and previous criteria for ‘autistic disorder’ or ‘PDDNOS’, and there are people in Kanner’s original writings who would meet (or be falsely assumed to meet and therefore get diagnosed with, which often amounts to the same thing given how all professionals starting with Kanner and Asperger see traits that aren’t there and miss ones that are) DSM-IV and previous criteria for ‘Asperger disorder’ or ‘PDDNOS’.  The two original doctors also both focused on different aspects of similar people, so if you sent the same kid to both people he’d be described totally differently.  Mind you I don’t even consider autism to be a thing the way most people do.  But even though I consider it to actually be a bunch of people who don’t always have significant things in common, I don’t consider the differences to have anything whatsoever to do with Kanner vs. Asperger, that’s barking up the wrong tree entirely even for people who believe fervently in these ways of categorizing people.  

When Nobel laureates are announced annually—especially in physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, and economics—increasingly, in the given field, rather than just a single laureate, there are two, or the maximally permissible three, who often have independently made the same discovery.[according to whom?][citation needed] Historians and sociologists have remarked on the occurrence, in science, of "multiple independent discovery". Robert K. Merton defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other.[3][4] Merton contrasted a "multiple" with a "singleton" — a discovery that has been made uniquely by a single scientist or group of scientists working together.[5] As Merton said, "Sometimes the discoveries are simultaneous or almost so; sometimes a scientist will make a new discovery which, unknown to him, somebody else has made years before."[4][page needed] [6]

De Rotterdam, by OMA (image courtesy Arc Real Estate)

Av. Sao Luis, Sao Paulo, Brazil. 

When I first saw an image of De Rotterdam, by OMA, I knew I had seen something vaguely similar somewhere before; an older, more “anonymous” and “vernacular” version of it in a distant metropolis. I just couldn’t remember where, exactly.

Then, lo and behold, while looking through my photo archive today, I came…

The concept of multiple discovery (also known as simultaneous invention) is the hypothesis that most scientific discoveries and inventions are made independently and more or less simultaneously by multiple scientists and inventors. The concept of multiple discovery opposes a traditional view—the "heroic theory" of invention and discovery.

Multiples

When Nobel laureates are announced annually—especially in physics, chemistry, physiology-or-medicine, and economics—increasingly, in the given field, rather than just a single laureate, there are two, or the maximally-permissible three, who often have independently made the same discovery.

Historians and sociologists have remarked on the occurrence, in science, of "multiple independent discovery". Robert K. Merton defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other. Merton contrasted a "multiple" with a "singleton" — a discovery that has been made uniquely by a single scientist or group of scientists working together. As Merton said, "Sometimes the discoveries are simultaneous or almost so; sometimes a scientist will make a new discovery which, unknown to him, somebody else has made years before."

Commonly cited examples of multiple independent discovery are the 17th-century independent formulation of calculus by Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and others, described by A. Rupert Hall;the 18th-century discovery of oxygen by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and others;[citation needed] and the theory of evolution of species, independently advanced in the 19th century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. What holds for discoveries, also goes for inventions. Examples are the blast furnace (invented independently in China, Europe and Africa), the crossbow (invented independently in China, Greece, Africa, northern Canada, and the Baltic countries),[citation needed] and magnetism (discovered independently in Greece, China, and India).

Multiple independent discovery, however, is not limited to only a few historic instances involving giants of scientific research. Merton believed that it is multiple discoveries, rather than unique ones, that represent the common pattern in science.

Mechanism

Multiple discoveries in the history of science provide evidence for evolutionary models of science and technology, such as memetics (the study of self-replicating units of culture), evolutionary epistemology (which applies the concepts of biological evolution to study of the growth of human knowledge), and cultural selection theory (which studies sociological and cultural evolution in a Darwinian manner).

A recombinant-DNA-inspired "paradigm of paradigms" has been posited, that describes a mechanism of "recombinant conceptualization."This paradigm predicates that a new concept arises through the crossing of pre-existing concepts and facts. This is what is meant when one says that a scientist or artist has been "influenced by" another—etymologically, that a concept of the latter's has "flowed into" the mind of the former. Not every new concept so formed will be viable: adapting social Darwinist Herbert Spencer's phrase, only the fittest concepts survive.