'Losing touch with the ground': verticality, aerial surveying and the (post)colonial representation of Africa, 1912-1957.

In the context of the US-led 'Global War on Terror', considerable recent attention has been paid within geography and critical geopolitics to issues of 'verticality', surveillance, and aerial reconnaissance. A concurrent public interest in maps as tools and emblems of power is apparent in the success of the British Library's recent Magnificent Maps exhibition and the BBC series The Beauty of Maps. This project contextualises these academic and popular concerns by addressing a topic yet to be subjected to detailed scholarly investigation: the technological transition from land-based to aerial map-making during the early years of the twentieth century, and particularly between 1912 and 1957.

The proposed research focuses on surveying projects in the context of British colonial Africa, specifically those undertaken between the Survey of Nigeria (1912) and the work of the Directorate of Overseas Surveys in Uganda (1957). At the turn of the twentieth century, surveying teams typically hauled cumbersome equipment across large distances, commonly on foot. By mid-century, topographic survey had become increasingly mechanized and, perhaps even more significantly, had taken to the skies through the use of new aviation technologies. Whilst some saw this as progress, others saw it as 'losing touch with the ground'. In its specific attention to the surveying and mapping of Africa, the project intends to examine the scientific construction of landscape (and its political regulation) in the context of colonial-era ideologies and power relations.

Accounts written by members of the Royal Geographical Society, the Colonial and War Offices, and the Ordnance Survey hint at the underlying politico-economic ambitions of this technological transition, while more prosaic technical histories have been written by enthusiasts and/or documented in journals such as 'Photogrammetric Record'. The role of these technologies in defining representations of British colonial Africa, and the reciprocal effects of the field on surveying practice, remains a significant lacunae in geographical scholarship and an important history as yet unwritten.

This project seeks a vivid reconstruction of surveying practices in the field, integrating existing textual accounts into a broader social history by linking written archives and spoken personal testimony to material traces in the Science Museum's surveying collection. It seeks in these non-textual sources to recover the role of, inter alios, indigenous porters and technicians, aviators, colonial tax officials, oil-prospectors, and anthropologists. In so doing this project seeks to account for the development and circulation of the techniques and practices associated with aerial surveying - how these were learned, by who, and for what purpose? These questions sit at the heart of what Latour has described as 'circuits of knowledge'.

Among other scholarly outcomes, this project will highlight the significance of the Science Museum's surveying collection while drawing out new historical understandings of technologies/techniques that have configured twentieth century representations of political and economic landscapes. Specifically, the project will use oral history interviews to contextualise the practice of aerial survey and to articulate the biography of the object collections of the Science Museum. The intention, in so doing, is to suggest new ways in which the Museum's collection of survey material can be curated and made available to the Museum's audiences in physical and digital form. This will include contributing to the Museum's proposed 'Making Modern Science' gallery. More broadly, the project will act as a catalyst to the critical engagement with oral history in the context of curatorial practice in science and technology museums. These new connections will be explored through a workshop (for specialist

In various respects, the project will have direct benefits to the Science Museum (and its publics), to the wider museum sector, and for current academic understandings of surveying technology in the context of 'verticality' and aerial geographies.

Science Museum (and wider museum sector)

In its investigation of the Museum's object collections of surveying instruments, the project shall cast new light on material which has been previously hidden from public view. It is the intention of this project to think critically about how such material can best be made sense of, interpreted, and displayed to the public. It will do so, in part, by attending to the use of oral history as a tool for historical research and for museum curation. It is anticipated that the project will suggest valuable new ways in which the Museum can communicate the significance of its collections to its audiences (broadly conceived). This will include the student assisting in the design and curation of the Museum's forthcoming 'Making Modern Science' gallery. More generally, it is hoped that the project will make a useful contribution to debates over the digital curation and display of material in the context of UK and international science and technology museums.

Academic audiences

In the context of recent scholarly attention to issues of 'verticality' within and beyond geography, the proposed project will contribute to, and advance, conceptual understandings of aerial survey and to the epistemic implications of interrogating the ground from the air. In so doing, it will intersect a number of current intellectual concerns to do with surveillance, reconnaissance, and the political implications of survey and mapping. It will also seek to historicise these concerns by addressing the civil, non-military survey of colonial and post-colonial British Africa. Its intention is thus to expand the current, somewhat narrow focus on contemporary conflicts and securitisation in the 'Age of Terror'.

Public audiences

The project seeks to make a number of contributions beyond traditional academic audiences and to make its results available to interested parties, both specialist and non-specialist. Specifically the project will produce a publicly-accessible exhibition of the Science Museum's aerial surveying collection, in digital format, intended to facilitate and widen access to this material. This is a particularly significant move given the potential to engage audiences which reflect the project's regional focus on Africa. The project will also produce an archive of oral history recordings which will be made accessible, using an on-line database, to future researchers and to interested members of the public.