The Giornale Nuovo writes about Wunderkammern. Great!
Here in Lund, there is such a cabinet of curiosities, at the Museum of history; I guess the most famous object is what is said to be a piece of Descartes’ skull. (An interesting parallel to Galileo’s middle finger, which however seems to be The Real Thing, whereas the piece of Descartes’ isn’t, at least according to prof. Rolf Lindborg.)
Speaking of the remains of Great Men, have a look at Heinrich Matiegka, Bericht über die Untersuchung der Gebeine Tycho Brahe’s (Prague, 1901), for an account of an osteological analysis of the two skeletons in Tycho’s grave.
Re the discussion of antiintellectualism, mass education &c. going on, for example over at Halavais and at plastic, I found this quote appropriate:
“”Why doth solid and serious learning decline, and few or none follow it now in the university”
Anthony Wood said this and I can’t link to his blog, because the quote is from 1677 (and concerns conditions at Oxford). (Quoted from Atkinson, “Willliam Derham, FRS (1657-1735)”, Annals of science vol 8 (1952), 368-392, 371.) The problem is quite old … Wood also claimed that one reason for the below-par quality of student achievement was too much beer.
Interesting stuff, as usual, over at Desbladet (one of my favourite blogs at the moment):
“There is an interesting question of whether the industrialisation of academia and the apparent increase in bandwagon-jumping, as evidenced by, say, Chomsky’s influence in linguistics, string theory in theoretical physics, or ‘Derrida’ in LitCrit has had a debilitating effect on intellectual life.”
(Read the whole entry.)
Bandwagonjumping is, indeed, all over the place. But has it increased? It is easy to think of a number of bandwagons in just about any century you care to choose.
While we are on the subject, let me just point you to an entry on another of my favourite blogs, Nasty scholar:
“I think I’m gonna quit academia, after all. In the social sciences, no-one cares about substance anymore. The sheer pain of having to look at the most vapid, well-referenced and poorly thought, playing for the audience, bums on seats-research getting lauded and published is enough to make me fucking puke.”
(Read more.)
“The Dibner/Sloan History of Recent Science and Technology Project (HRST) and the Dibner Institute invite you to a conference on the novel opportunities and challenges that the World Wide Web presents for historians of science and technology. The conference has two goals: first, to provide a snapshot of some of the most original projects that use the Web to produce, present and disseminate scholarly and educational materials; and second, to examine critically the challenges as well as the opportunities that such projects face.”
More information.
Research interests
Sébastien has started a research-blog-matchmaking thing. So here’s a list of my research interests:
General:
history of science / Science and Technology Studies (STS)
More precise:
scientific practice c. 1850-today
visual representation of scientists in public culture
commemorative practices in the history of science
research policy
history of communication technologies
history of photography in science
history of medicine
In November (I’ve only just now discovered the blog in question), there was an entry on mamamusing on the definition of ‘our emerging academic discipline’ - IT, to which people come from a variety of fields, such as CS, Library Science, Philosophy &c. Students learn both practice and theory.
It seems the field, or at least the department where Elizabeth Lane Lawley teach, is in a discussion about ‘the nature of our emerging academic discipline’. They agree about a defining moment for the field: when ‘internetworking reached the desktop and the graphical web was born’. The discipline’s identity is coupled to a common technology/practice.
This is interesting and reminds me of a couple of examples from the history of science in the 20th century. (In general, I think work in the history of science or the broader field of science and technology studies can be of use for the discipline-confused academic of today. A way to gain perspective of what’s going on.)
Peter L. Galison describes physics as subdivided in books like Image and logic: A material culture of microphysics. The wide discipline of physics is divided into subdisciplines where groups of physicists share a practice and a language. A shared practice - the complicated detector technologies employed in microphysics, for example - is one defining part of the culture of such a subdiscipline. One could also look at the way Robert Kohler describes geneticists working with fruit flies in the inter-war period in Lords of the fly: Drosophila genetics and the experimental life.
Ben Hammersley pointed me to the concept of the lazyweb (now also a website). It is great.
I use Movable type as a content management system (…eh, bloggingtool) and I am thinking about an add-on to that system that could automatically analyse the entries on the blog. Clicking on an “Analyse me”-button in MT would start a cgi-script chewing on the MT database. Out would come statistics for the blog:
total number of entries
number of entries per month and/or week (in a graph)
number of entries per hour 1-24
number of words per post: mean number as well as a graph
word frequency (”Oh, dear, I must cut down on using ‘eloquently’, it is in four percent of the entries”)
link analysis: a list of domains ordered by number of links
etc
These data would be produced as a web page, with graphics and tables, a bit like the reports produced by web server statistics packages. The data would also be published in a standardised file format (RSS, perhaps) that could be accessed by another piece of software/web service, that automatically compared the textual output of several blogs.
I can’t write software - I am a historian - but perhaps someone has done something like this already or will do it in the future. One could hope that the lazyweb mechanism works in this case.
My lecture recently on science and technology in the 20th century was, as usual, about technological utopias, relations between science and politics, the presentation of the scientist as a type in media/advertisement and so on. I also played the students some music: Singing science records.
Normally I have lots and lots of pictures to supplement my babble and whiteboardscribble. This was the first time I used music.
“Accusations of mismanagement and theft at the United States’ most venerable nuclear-weapons laboratory have prompted the resignations of its top two managers”, Nature reports. After having sacked whistleblowers, the lab, run by UC since the 1940’s, is under closer scrutiny by congressional and federal officials who oversee the lab. A review might result in the lab being run by some other university or organisation.
Here is a preprint of my review of Sabino Maffeo, S.J., The Vatican Observatory: In the Service of Nine Popes (Vatican City State: Specola Vaticana, 2001). 429 pp. pb. $24.95. ISBN 88-209-7242-5. It will be published in Centaurus.
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