Super-Vision: Weather Watching and Table Reading in the Early Modern Royal Society and Académie Royale des Sciences

The use of astronomical and mathematical tables dates back to antiquity, and contributors to the annals of early modern European scientific societies such as the Royal Society of London and the Paris Académie Royale des Sciences extended them to meteorological observations submitted by a network of correspondents in Europe and beyond. Tables could be read in the usual fashion by finding the intersection of rows and columns. But they could also be scanned like an image, in the hopes of discovering subtle correlations between factors that seemed to presage changes in the weather. This practice of “seeing everything at a glance” in tables of weather observations echoes other early modern attempts to create synthetic images from heaps of data.