Facts aren't born; they are made. The challenge is to understand how people have come to think of facts as existing in the world independent of human intervention. This course explores the tools and techniques that people have used to craft facts in varied domains of applied science, such as agriculture, climate modeling, epidemiology, and pharmaceutical production. The course also examines how broader social structures, such as law and community, helped produce facts as people shared, defended, and used them. We consider examples from the 17th century through the present day, including practices of nature study, classification, quantification, and experiment. |