In the future, doing science will be like blogging, according to a (slightly ironical) take on citizen science by Bruce Sterling (my favourite, by the way, in this genre at the moment is Galaxy Zoo).
Doing science was like blogging.
Reading Sterling’s piece, I came to think of a paper presented by Staffan Müller-Wille at conference of the British Society for the History of Sciene in Leicester recently. Müller-Wille has a project on how Linnaeus and his colleagues handled what has been called an early crisis in bio-informatics: as the reach of natural history became more and more global, the amount of data in natural history increased rapidly; more or less exotic animals and plants were discovered and had to be fitted into the system somehow.
What Müller-Wille talked about in Leicester could be seen as a somewhat blog-like “content management system”: new data was entered into non-linear masses of text built from the outset to enable growth; just like in blogging, tags, categories and taxonomy were central functions. The metaphor should perhaps not be pushed too far, but in a sense, writing technologies in the practice of natural history was a bit like blogging.
Also, the social aspect of citizen science was there; natural history in the 18th century was crowdsourced science.
