XV: Sample, specimen, guinea pig

 

content

Showing swatches

Fashion dolls

Samples as extracts from society

Guinea pigs in psychology

 

 

For zoos and botanical gardens see:

chap. XVIII: worlds of art, amusement & entertainment

 

 

 

Showing swatches

 

According to Ottfried Dascher we have to assume, "that already the late Middle Ages were familiar with the practice of the following centuries to cut off and store swatches from textiles.“ Around 1300 the Florentine textile industry was renowned worldwide. It is plausible that the practice of showing and dispatching swatches (Italian „mostra”) started here. Since 1400 the word for it is „Muster” in German and „échantillon" in French (Ottfried Dascher, 1984; Shai-Shu Tzeng, 1993).

Soon these objects were put on cardboard and sorted according to quality, colour and type of material, such as wool, flax, cotton, silk. In the beginning that might have been useful for training, perfection of knowledge, for comparison or as memory aid ("pro memoria"), since it enabled a producer or a buyer to become acquainted with foreign techniques of weaving and glazing and to store own swatches to examine and control for quality.

The collection of such swatches allowed to set up cards. When bound, they formed a swatch book. That could happen in simplest forms, as documents of the 17th and 18th century show.

 

Even philosopher Nelson Goodman dealt with the topic of such „swatches“ („Ways of Worldmaking“, 1978; in German 1984, 47-48, 83-91, 161-167).

 

Bibliography:

model: special topics – Modelbücher, Musterbücher

 

 

Fashion dolls

 

Since about 1300 fashion dolls of all sizes are used as wearers and ambassadors of the newest fashion.

 

In 1396 the wife of the French king Charles VI., Isabella of Bavaria, is say to have sent to her seven-year-old daughter Isabella (who was elected as second wife of the English king Richard II.) a life-size fashion doll with the newest creations of the French court to London (other sources say it was 1321 and 1391).

Before 1600 the French king Henri IV. sent to his engaged Marie de Medici small, elegantly dressed dolls to Florenz, in order to hold her up to date of the newest fashion. Later Parisians dolls were sent even to America.

 

bibliography:

mannequin/ fashion model

model: special topics - Spielzeug

 

 

Samples as extracts from society

 

William Petty was the first to make a sociograph exploration in 1655-56, and soon after he founded „political arithmetic". First statistic work originates from the same time around 1660.

Since 1740 - when the first consequences of the industrialization began to be clear - social sciences began to take the conditions of the working poor seriously. Around 1795 two Englishmen, David Davies and Sir Frederick Morton Eden, used a kind of questionnaire to explore these conditions.

 

A kind of “social experiments” claiming some representativeness has been practiced since 1800 by the so-called utopian socialists

Charles Fourier (1804-1836: “Phalanstère”, and thereof inspired 1844-46: Brook Farm Colony in Massachusetts),

Robert Owen (1824-27: “New Harmony”) and

Louis Blanc (1840: productive cooperatives).

 

Empirical social research was pioneered by the members of the “Royal Commissions” of 1825, whose efforts culminated in the Factory Act of 1833, allowing routine inspection of factories. The results of their research were used by Marx and Engels.

 

Since 1840 social surveys have been conducted in many countries

The journalist Henry Mayhew used already 1851 „nondirective interviews". The mining engineer Frédéric Le Play refined 1855 the "observation method".

 

In 1895 the Norwegian Anders N. Kiaer presented his idea of a sample based on what he called "representative enumerations" for the first time to public. Later he used many representative samples as a basis for statistics, especially with regard to income statistics. In England Sir Arthur L Bowley used 1912-14 the procedure of random sampling.

 

bibliography:

Heinz Maus: Zur Vorgeschichte der empirischen Sozialforschung. In René König (Ed.): Handbuch der empirischen Sozialforschung, Bd. I, 1967; 3. ed. as pocket ed. in 4 vols, Stuttgart: Enke 1973, vol. 1, 21-56.

 

 

Guinea pigs in psychology

 

So-called “guinea pigs” have been used in medical or physiological experimentation since 1820 (see chapter XXIII: substitute).

In psychology persons used for experiments have sometimes, since 1913, also been called “guinea pigs”.

 

In the early times of scientific psychology, i. e. since 1850 in the days of Gustav Theodor Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt, Hermann Ebbinghaus, Georg Elias Müller and the Würzburg School, these were mostly the professors and assistants theirselves serving as test subjects - Ebbinghaus got his insights into the human memory (1885) with only one subject: himself. Yet the researchers pretended the results of their experiments to be “representative”.

 

Only over the years experimentation with a more or less small group of humans became a more suitable mirror of people’s experience and feeling, thinking and behavior.

 

bibliography:

Human/ animal experimentation/ guinea pigs - Animal models/ model organisms

Forschungsmethoden der Psychologie