INFORMATION ECOLOGIES

My current research project looks at the history of botany as an information system, and it focuses on the herbarium cabinet as a convergence of botanical and ideological thinking. Though the basic structure of the herbarium has changed little since the Enlightenment, my story is one of transition: whereas in the eighteenth century, the herbarium—or  “plant machine”—reflected the ideas underpinning botany, a century later, the herbarium helped to shape the way botanists understood plants. Through the figure of Asa Gray, I look at how herbaria came to organize botanical thinking. Through its reordering of nature into the anthropomorphic taxonomic system of categories and relationships within those categories, the herbarium takes the ecological system as it exists in the natural world and effectively makes a new system. This new system is what I am calling an “information ecology,” one in which the plant must first become a singular, individual unit— a species specimen—that then can be ordered to function in botany’s taxonomic systems. 

PUBLICATIONS

“Hope in the Herbarium: A Record of What is Lost and Found” in Arnoldia: The Nature of Trees. Special Issue on “Extinction” edited by Yota Batsaki and Peter Crane. 81(2): 26-37. Co-authored with Mason Heberling.