Predictive Knowledge Infrastructures and Future-related Expertise Before the Cold War.

Experts, Social Scientists, and Techniques of Prognosis in Cold War America convincingly demonstrates the importance of RAND's Delphi method and political gaming as techniques of prognosis that were central to the construction of Cold War futures expertise. The book begins from the premise that although expertise in various forms of prognosis, prediction, and forecasting predated the creation of RAND, different modes of interaction among experts at RAND defined a new form of future-oriented expertise during the Cold War. This visual essay will use this premise as an entry point into other, earlier historical examples of interaction, albeit in different forms, that also produced expert knowledge about the future: 1.) nineteenth-century meteorological knowledge infrastructures and what Aitor Anduaga has described as "epistemic networks," 2.) agricultural statistics and cooperative bureaucracy, and 3.) early twentieth-century business forecasting and what Seth Rockman has identified as the "paper technologies of capitalism." This visual essay examines three images that illuminate earlier historical examples of expert interaction in predictive knowledge infrastructures in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. The essay employs historian Paul Edwards's definition of knowledge infrastructures as "robust networks of people, artifacts, and institutions that generate, share, and maintain specific knowledge about the human and natural worlds." An infrastructural framework, as Edwards observes, shifts away from "thinking about knowledge as pure facts, theories, and ideas" and instead "views knowledge as an enduring, widely shared sociotechnical system." The visual essay format makes visible the material components of a knowledge infrastructure as well as its symbolic meanings, and it also reminds us to ask what is not pictured and why. This essay focuses on how these knowledge infrastructures have combined data, information, judgment, and opinion to produce expert knowledge about the future, and it asks us to consider how future-oriented expertise has emerged historically and who counts as an expert. It will explore three main questions: How has interaction among experts historically taken place at a distance and in person? How did knowledge infrastructures, bureaucracies, and paperwork shape the production of expert knowledge about the future before the Cold War? How has expert foreknowledge historically relied on various forms of "futurework" as labor? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]