Geography

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https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00513.x

My claim is that concerns over method and
conduct were central to geography as an emergent
science within newly-established institutions in nineteenth-century Britain. My particular focus is on the
development of methods and methodological concerns with reference to authors and texts calling for
the use of scientific instruments in the regulation of
observation, inscription and measurement. The study
of ‘in-the-hand’ published guides to method and conduct rather than ‘in-the-field’ human guides (Schaffer
et al. 2009) is instructive in this regard. In their strictures over how to travel and undertake field research,
such guides reveal why travel was important, in terms
of direct observation, reliable authorisation and the
use of instrumentation as bases to credible truth
claims. As Driver has shown in examining the RGS’s
1854 Hints to travellers, that work was set within a
wider context of instructive rhetoric in early science
and was itself an unstable attempt to impose authority
over geography as an emergent, yet far from coherent, field of enquiry (Driver 1998 2001, 56–67). This
was particularly so in seeking ‘to resolve some fundamental dilemmas abut the means and status of observation in the field’ (Driver 2001, 66). As an
instructive manual that went through seven further
editions between 1865 and 1901 in order to reflect
methodological concerns (such as a new section on
photography in the 1865 edition), Hints to travellers
retained two features as constant: ‘an insistence on
the need to record observations in a standardised
form, . . . and an emphasis on the use of reliable scientific instruments’ (Driver 1998, 25).