Co-Creating Maps and Atlases Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate Lorraine Daston Columbia Global Reports

In her new book, Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate, historian of science Lorraine Daston interrogates two massive scientific undertakings: the Carte du Ciel, a 19th-century effort to map the positions of millions of stars, and the post–World War II revision to the International Cloud Atlas, a resource for meteorologists that sought to standardize vocabulary used to describe clouds. Why, she wonders, “did the people and institutions charged with completing the star map and updating the cloud atlas decide to cooperate rather than defect?” They were rivals, after all, were they not?