Recommended reading, and an interesting example of an author blogging his way through writing a book. “This and the blog posts that follow are the first draft of the survey. Let me know if I miss anything stupid”, he writes.
The book in itself looks very promising. Things I’ve read before by Agar is interesting (his book on the Jodrell Bank observatory and his paper on the 1960′s are two examples), but also because this kind of broader surveys are interesting takes on science and technology.
There are several, recently published – Pickstone Ways of Knowing, Bowler & Morus, Making Modern Science, Patricia Fara, Science: a four thousand year history – but there is definitely room for many more. Some more, and you would have literature for a reading course for advanced students on Big picture historiography.
Upgrading to the latest versions of Zotero and Word plugin broke Word integration.
The reason: I use a non-English version of Word and the installer seems to think that I’m on an English version. (Duh, all that technological imperialism …)
The solution:
look for the folder /username/Dokument/Microsoft användardata/Word script menu items/Zotero (or the equivalent to these Swedish folder names in your local language); this is the place the Word plugin need to be placed for it to work.
Also, find the folder /username/Dokument/Microsoft User Data/Word Script menu items/Zotero. This is the place where the installer, assuming that we are on English installs, has placed the 3.0a5 plugin.
Move the stuff in the Zotero subfolder to the Zotero subfolder in …/Microsoft användardata/…
It works!
I’m on Word2008 (Swedish), Mac 10.5.6, Firefox 3.5.3.
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.
For some time now, I’ve been using Zotero 1 because I had difficulties with Microsoft Word 2008 crashing using Zotero 1.5 and the alpha version of the Word plugin. Now, trying out the latest versions of the Word plugin and Zotero (2.0 beta) and so far it works!
I’m going to the annual conference of the British Society for the History of Science in Leicester 2-5 July (was a bit lucky with the dates for the conference, since I have a ticket to see Depeche Mode in Copenhagen on June 30). I look forward to going to the conference and also seeing Leicester, have never been there before.
Abstract for my paper:
The Lund Observatory Milky Way panorama and all-sky images in the history of modern astronomy
All-sky pictures have often entailed manipulated image technologies rather than mechanical objectivity, and have been used both in astronomical science and in popular astronomy. In this paper, several 20th century astronomical practices of representing the whole sky are discussed, particularly the Lund observatory panorama of the Milky Way (1955). Produced by an artist working for two years under the direction of professor Knut Lundmark, it was a mixture of astronomical photography, photometric measurements and artistic creativity; Lundmark simultaneously aimed for scientific correctness and aesthetic value. Produced just at the dawn of the space age with a growing interest in astronomy in publishing and the media, the image became widely used in popular astronomy, academic textbooks, television programmes, museum exhibits &c. Based on archival material at the Lund observatory, it is possible to follow the media history of this picture through several decades and discuss the role of images in post-war astronomical culture.
There are types of artefacts from various epochs that each are sites worthy of exploration by the historian interested in the visual culture of astronomy; CCD shots by amateur astronomers of today, 14 inch glass plates exposed in 1950′s 1 m-class Schmidt telescopes, cinematography of protuberances and other solar phenomena first shot on 35 mm film then on video, engravings in large format in 18th century star atlases, 19th century photography such as the Carte du Ciel-plates, drawings of nebulae by the Herschels and their contemporaries: these are only a handful of the categories that are kind of obvious and have been discussed by historians of astronomy; much work still remain to be done on each of them.
But what about some types of pictures that might be not so obvious but that make up quite significant parts of the image-worlds of astronomers (both professional and amateurs)? What about posters?
When I became interested in astronomy as a young boy (I was born in 1967), I entered a culture with images that were food for thought and dreams, images in books, magazines and Viewmaster discs. There were colourful posters of Apollo rocket hardware and the moon on the walls of my boyhood room. As I moved through the educational system, astronomical posters were present: in gymnasium and at the university departments, observatories and planetaria I visited, studied or worked at.
Some of these posters are placed in educational contexts, but some were perhaps rather put there by astronomers for themselves, a bit like the small collections of old instruments often found on display in university departments (as trophies, like the old cannons you find outside of military installations, a metaphor used by Mats Fridlund long ago). Sky Publishing was only one of several firms supplying these kinds of large-scale images to professional and amateur astronomers, often on-sale at planetarium and museum shops and in ads in Sky and telescope.
I suspect that the astronomical wall poster has a history that is kind of interesting. There must be some literature on the subject. We’ll see what I find.
Classifying galaxies by morphology has normally been done by small teams of astronomers or individual astronomers, like Peter Nilson spending years classifying objects on the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey producing the Uppsala General Catalogue.
Galaxyzoo is another way to do classifications of galaxy morphology. The work of hundreds of thousands of astronomy enthusiasts is used. Astronomy has an old tradition of professional astronomers collaborating with amateur astronomers, and basically I see this project as something of an evolution rather than a revolution. It is pro-am collaboration in astronomy done with e-science methods.
Participants in Galaxy Zoo classify basic galaxy morphology – spiral or elliptical, bulge visibility, bar formations, interaction – on images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey over the Net. The first part of the project seems to have been successful; 170 000 people or so participated, classifying some 40 million galaxies, and the team behind it has begun to get papers out: here, here, here and here.
Now Galaxy Zoo 2 has started, basically a re-run through parts of the first catalogue with a closer look at morphology; more data about each object is collected. Judging from the onslaught on the servers – the pages have been loading very slow since this morning – a lot of people try to participate (helped by recent exposure on the BBC).
Update: servers crashed but came up again, thanks to backup. (But the site is unreachable now, 19 February 9 am CET.)
Perhaps it is easy to overtheorize a phenomenon such as mashups, making too much out of it, overstretching its use as metaphor. For one thing, while musical mashups sometimes can be “official” – such as when Kylie Minogue performed a mashup of her “Can’t get you out of my head” and New Order’s “Blue monday” – most of the time they are not endorsed by the artists (or the label’s lawyers), whereas astronomical data mashups are encouraged and have become routine practice. Once the principal investigators have mined the data, datasets are opened up.
Having said that, I still find the mashup music of the early 00′s – exemplified above by Dsico’s fine blend of Missy Elliott (2001) and Joy Division (1980) – something of a metaphor for what at times goes on in science. Sometimes datasets – songs – recorded for one purpose are merged with other datasets, recorded under other circumstances, to produce a work that was not thought of by the makers of the original datasets, something that builds something new and strong upon two rather disjointed things. Trivial, I know, but still I find it an interesting thing to consider; astronomers’ daily practice is sometimes about doing such mashups. Astronomy has developed a culture of making whole datasets publically available, and one part of astronomical practice is putting such stuff together.
This is not something new, something that goes on in our e-science epoch using the web as infrastructure. Take the Lund Observatory Milky Way Panorama (1955), for example. It was produced from photographs – the Franklin-Adams Atlas (1914), for example -, data for the positions and magnitudes of 7000 stars, photometric measurements of the Milky Way, data for converting RA and declination to galactic coordinates &c.
From Photographic Photometry of the Southern Milky Way (Amsterdam, 1949) by Pannekoek, one of the datasets used by Knut Lundmark and his group.
Putting these diverse datasets together to the Lund Observatory Panorama was a non-trivial exercise; an artist worked on the task for two years, painstakingly painting the Milky way, with a basis in the datasets, under the guidance of Knut Lundmark, whose aesthetic judgment seemed to have played an important role in the genesis of the picture.
Mashups of standard datasets are, as I mentioned, encouraged. There are also tools available, facilitating the mashups. Take SkyView, the frontend to many sky survey data from across the spectrum. At the query page you choose between datasets, from gamma rays to radio and can mix them up; you can choose different projections, plot coordinate grids &c.
Here is a mashup of M31 I just produced. Red and green are IRAS data, blue is the blue plate from the Palomar sky survey. Combining data from a photographic sky survey produced on Mount Palomar between 1948 and 1958 with the large Schmidt telescope there and originally recorded on photographic glass plates, 14 inches square (and in our age digitized with high-precision scanners) with data from a multi-national infrared telescope project, observing from a satellite in orbit around the earth in 1983, was just a matter of a few clicks.
Just a small note, this time, on customizing Zotero’s Word plugin: I have wanted keyboard shortcuts to Zotero, for example for insert note, instead of clicking on a button. Found this on the Zotero forum:
# 1 is indeed a word processor issue. In Word, choose Tools –> Customize –> Keyboard, pick “Macros” from the Categories list, pick (e.g.) “ZoteroInsertCitation” from the Macros list. Write your shortcut key sequence of choice (e.g. F4) where it says “Press new shortcut key”, –> Assign –> Close.
Works like a charm. (I’m on Word 2004, Mac OS X 10.5.4.)
Also, these last days I’ve been working on one of my papers; it’s still early in the process, so lots of pdf’s are downloaded and references collected, and Zotero’s automatic way of getting reference data from, for example, ADS, which I’ve been using a lot, is really a boon. Much more handy than having Endnote to connect to some other database than ADS just to get this stuff. It’s becoming second nature, now, after a while; whenever I see some paper that is interesting, I look for the symbol in the address field in Firefox and just click. Really handy.
Now, I’ve taken a step back from Zotero Synch Preview 1.5 used in connection with Word 2008 (on Mac) to 1.0.9 used in connection with Word 2004.
The reason is the instability (it is, after all, an alpha version) of the Word plugin; several times, it has made Word hang, most often when inserting a bibliography.
Backtracking to the 1.0.9 version was easy:
I exported my library to a file on my desktop
uninstalled Zotero from Firefox
removed the Zotero folder from /Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles//zotero
installed the 1.0.9 version
imported the library from the desktop
When starting Word 2004, everything seems to be working fine.
Sometimes it is better not to live the bleeding-edge early adopter life of using software in beta and alpha state!
In the process, I got good support from the Zotero Forum, which I appreciate (here and here).
