Telling Lives in Meteorology: A Dialogue between Readers and Writers

This panel discussion will create a space where interested readers can talk with biographers and creators of other projects that explore the lives of historical atmospheric scientists. The panelists include historians writing in established biographical genres, as well as creators exploring ways to "tell lives" through creative non-fiction, life history oral interviews, and prosopography (collective biography). The audience will be invited to discuss what readers want from science biography today. Questions to be addressed may include:

• What can today’s atmospheric scientists learn from the biographies of previous atmospheric scientists?
• How can we make biographical writing more engaging, provocative, inspiring or transformative?
• Who has been excluded from previous biographical projects, with what consequences?
• What can (or should) scientific biography look like in "new media" forms, like blogs, digital archives, and content designed for sharing on social media?

The discussants will introduce their current projects, and draw on their range of experiences writing about lives. Jim Fleming (Colby College) will discuss advantages and limitations of biographical approaches in the telling of large-scale, complex stories. Jen Henderson (CIRES) will discuss some of ethical challenges of representation in writing about others and opportunities for drawing on techniques from the field of creative nonfiction (e.g. fictional techniques) to generate narrative complexity. Sean Potter, CCM, CBM, will discuss his in-progress biography—being published by the AMS—of Cleveland Abbe, America's first weather forecaster and founding father of the U.S. Weather Bureau, who did more than any single person to help lay the foundation for modern weather forecasting in the United States. Roger Turner (Science History Institute) will describe the challenges and opportunities of writing about meteorological lives for internet audiences, and will explore unconventional ways to recover stories about people not included in narrower tellings of the history of atmospheric science.