Who gets to record, experiment, interpret, speculate, discover? (Keynote)

The making and analysis of astronomical images has been seen as a shifting, gendered activity, shaping and shaped by epistemology.  Starting early in the twentieth century, women played a central role in the classification of stellar spectra read off photographic glass plates: their work transformed astronomy.  So too did their work on the sorting and measuring of nuclear emulsion images that ushered in particle physics.  What kind of knowledge production was ascribed to the women who invented and conducted the work of organizing stars into objective categories?  What role, what credit, what form of scientific life was accorded to those who peered through microscopes reckoning whether the wispy tracks imprinted in emulsions marked ordinary physics—or instead led to radical, new discoveries?  In the twentieth-century intersection of gender-in-science and management-of-science, we see in image analysis a re-formation of what counted as a discovery, what counted as skill and, ultimately, what was thought to constitute the persona of a scientist.