ABSTRACT
This chapter situates self-tracking technologies as part of our worlds by asking what we might learn from historical examples of technologies that monitor or measure the human body and have become enduringly ubiquitous in everyday life. Through an analysis of historical written accounts, sites and reported events of technological and scientific innovation and use, it investigates how and why certain technologies of human measurement have become ubiquitous in our lives. The chapter examines what they have enabled people and societies to know, how visualization and sensory ways of knowing have been implicated in their design and use, and how they have impacted on human perception of the spatiality of everyday worlds. It examines how the human experiences, activities and practices associated with historical technologies of body monitoring and measurement have become culturally embedded.
