During Michaelmas Term, OxTalks will be moving to a new platform (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
For now, continue using the current page and event submission process (freeze period dates to be advised).
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Tables have long constituted one of the principal graphic tools through which scientists represent their understanding of the natural world. Nowhere is this more visible than in astronomy, where tabular traditions stretch back to the Babylonians of the first millennium before the common era. Origin stories of fundamental cognitive and epistemic change have relied heavily on the translation of celestial experience into tabular formats, a development said to be driven by broad media shifts (orality to literacy, script to print). In this talk, I show to the contrary that despite the affordances of print and the long history of tabular formats for astronomical purposes, early modern European scholars’ motives for sending records of astronomical observation to the press were contingent and local, as were the emerging conventions of representing such empirical data within the economy of the printed page.