Biggish data: Friedrich Engels, material ecology, and Victorian data

ABSTRACT

Through Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), this article examines two prominent themes in environmental humanities – vital ecological materialism and ‘big data’. Engels’ vivid descriptions of factories, houses, and environment shared the central tenets of ‘material ecology’ – ‘thing power’ (Jane Bennett); ‘intra-actions’ of social and material agency (Karen Barad); ‘trans-corporeality’ (Stacy Alaimo) – and met Bennett’s call to align vital and historical materialism. The main body of the paper connects his analysis both to current debates about integrating ‘big data’ into social science and the humanities and to comparable nineteenth-century developments in statistics and data visualisation. Engels articulated the working-class condition by blending four distinct modes of investigation: big data; qualitative survey research; literary thick description; and theory (the nascent critique of capitalist political economy). Such a mix remains rich with possibilities for sociology and humanities not only in communicating but in generating knowledge about complex ecologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Friedrich Engels
• materialism
• big data
• intra-action
• transcorporeality
• environmental humanities

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following for invitations and opportunities to present earlier versions of this paper: Dr Justine Pizzo (University of Southampton) at the ‘Victorian Environments’ symposium, June 2017, the first UK meeting of the Vcologies research network; Professor Hannes Bergthaller (National Chung-Hsing University, November 2018); and Jim Scown, The British Society for Literature and Science’s Winter Symposium, 2018 (Cardiff University). My thanks also to Emma Streatfield (University of Worcester) for providing publishable images for Figures 1 and 2.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 References with page number only refer to the edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845/2009) listed in the reference list.