scholarly journals Building infrastructure in the digital age: case study of the Isis Bibliography of History of Science, 2002-2018

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Stephen P. Weldon
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Digital Environment ◽  
Knowledge Infrastructure ◽  
Digital Resource ◽  
History Of ◽  
Networking Technologies ◽  
Digital Knowledge ◽  
Historical Methods ◽  
Knowledge Ecology

The IsisCB Explore went online in 2015 as a foundational digital resource for historians of science. Built on the History of Science Society’s 100-year-old Isis Bibliography of the History of Science, this service is meant to lay the groundwork for a digital infrastructure to support historical work in the relatively new digital environment where so much modern scholarship now takes place. In order to create this resource, the director of the project, Stephen Weldon, has learned how to shape traditional historical methods, practices, and resources to fit the new digital paradigm. Computer and networking technologies have been built out of the needs and practices of technologists, natural scientists, and business innovators, all of whom employ it in very specific ways, quite different from the practices of humanistic scholarship, and history in particular. As a result, the digital environment is not especially friendly to historical work or products. As a result, it has taken a great deal of effort to understand and refactor historical data so that it functions well within a digital knowledge ecology, a “knowledge infrastructure,” as Christine Borgman refers to it. This paper describes the difficulties (epistemological, cultural, and economic) that make the creation of tools like the IsisCB Explore service challenging for historians and suggests some ways forward.

From the Evidence of History to the History of Evidence

2021 ◽  
pp. 70-98
Author(s):  
Stathis Psillos
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Realism ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Pessimistic Induction ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Universal Gravitation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second Shift

This chapter looks into the transition from the Cartesian natural philosophy to the Newtonian one, and then to the Einsteinian science, making the following key point: though the shift from Descartes’s theory to Newton’s amounted to a wholesale rejection of Descartes’s theory, in the second shift, a great deal was retained; Newton’s theory of universal gravitation gave rise to a research program that informed and constrained Einstein’s theory. Newton’s theory was a lot more supported by the evidence than Descartes’s and this made it imperative for the successor theory to accommodate within it as much as possible of Newton’s theory: evidence for Newton’s theory became evidence for Einstein’s. This double case study motivates a rebranding of the “divide et impera” strategy against the pessimistic induction introduced in the book Scientific Realism, which shifts attention from the (crude) evidence of the history of science to the (refined) history of evidence for scientific theories.

scholarly journals Pasts and Presents of Urban Socio-Hydrogeology: Groundwater Levels in Berlin, 1870–2020

Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
pp. 2261
Author(s):  
Theresa Frommen ◽  
Timothy Moss
Keyword(s):  
Groundwater Management ◽  
Urban Groundwater ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Subsurface Water ◽  
Water History ◽  
Groundwater Levels ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Methods

Although it is self-evident that today’s groundwater issues have a history that frames both problems and responses, these histories have received scant attention in the socio-hydrogeological literature to date. This paper aims to enrich the field of socio-hydrogeology with a novel, historical perspective on groundwater management whilst simultaneously demonstrating the value to water history of engaging with groundwater. This is achieved by applying hydrogeological, socio-hydrogeological, and historical methods in an interdisciplinary and collaborative research process while analysing a case study of urban groundwater management over a 150-year period. In the German capital Berlin, local aquifers have always been central to its water supply and, being close to the surface, have made for intricate interactions between urban development and groundwater levels. The paper describes oscillations in groundwater levels across Berlin’s turbulent history and the meanings attached to them. It demonstrates the value to socio-hydrogeology of viewing the history of groundwater through a socio-material lens and to urban history of paying greater attention to subsurface water resources. The invisibility and inscrutability associated with groundwater should not discourage attention, but rather incite curiosity into this underexplored realm of the subterranean city, inspiring scholars and practitioners well beyond the confines of hydrogeology.

‘Just put it online’: The Taylor White Project as a digitization case study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Zinger
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Interactive Visualizations ◽  
Digital Collection ◽  
History Of ◽  
Source Materials

Creating access to digital surrogates of primary source materials has spurred the growth of history of science as a field. Enabling and supporting virtual access requires an understanding of the behind-the-scenes requirements of a digitization project. Using McGill's Taylor White Project as a case study, this article reveals how such a project is managed, to result in a unique digital collection that supports research in both the humanities and the sciences. The workflows described transformed a collection of 938 eighteenth-century natural history drawings from a relatively inaccessible archive to a searchable and browsable digital collection, complete with contextualizing interactive visualizations. Understanding this process reveals some of the ways in which digitized data can create new avenues for questioning and examining information.

scholarly journals History of science: the problem of cataloging, knowledge indexing and information retrieval in the digital space

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Carla Bromberg
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Traditional Approach ◽  
Digital Environment ◽  
Multimedia Documents ◽  
Subject Analysis ◽  
Digital Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
Access To Knowledge ◽  
The Relationship

Text-based and multimedia documents in and for history of science are displayed in libraries and ought to be organized to make knowledge and information on history of science accessible. The traditional approach to the organization of and access to knowledge and information was expressed by classification schemes primarily influenced by philosophical traditions, and then mostly based on the literary warrant principle. Within this context, the scholarly and scientific literature was seen as representing facts about knowledge and structures of knowledge. Cataloging and classification were essential to provide users access to information. Cataloging elements consist of bibliographic description, subject analysis and classification. Currently, within the digital environment, not only text-based documents, but documents of all sorts must be included, classified and organized in order to be browsed. In this paper I call the attention to some of the improvements and challenges that currently affect the relationship between catalogs, knowledge organization, classification and information retrieval. As an example I mention the catalog-interface that is being developed for the digital library of CESIMA-Brazil.

scholarly journals The correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller: from nineteenth century paper to twenty first century data

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Gavan McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
First Century ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
Digital Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Correspondence Project

This paper presents a case study that demonstrates how a long term research activity, with the intention to create a scholarly edition of scientific correspondence, can be liberated from its print paradigm strictures to join the twenty first century world of interconnected knowledge. The Von Mueller Correspondence Project has produced a corpus of over 15,600 digitally transcribed letters and related materials focused on the period 1840 to 1896. These are complemented by materials in a range of forms that refer to Mueller dating from 1814 to 1931. Mueller was a prolific correspondent and established links with hundreds of fellow botanists and biologists across the globe; most of these, and certainly the most notable, will be registered in the History of Science Society Isis Cumulative Bibliography as Authority Records with links to publications about them and is some cases publications by them. The long-term plan is to systemically interlink the Von Mueller Correspondence Project digital corpus and the Isis Cumulative Bibliography and develop the synergies that will drive digital humanities analysis and future scholarly endeavour. That is the vision but what is the reality? At what stage is the project now? How did it get this far? What steps remain? How does the story of this project help us better understand the imperatives of digital scholarship – its strengths and its challenges?

Resurrecting Images from the Morgue: A Case Study of the London Free Press Collection of Photographic Negatives

Collections ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-392
Author(s):  
Tom Belton
Keyword(s):  
Free Press ◽  
Current Collection ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Digital Resource ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
Form Part ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
Management Issues

This paper is a case study of the ongoing transformation of the London Free Press Collection of Photographic Negatives from a physical archive to a digital one. This Collection is a typical medium-sized newspaper photographic negative morgue dating between 1938 and 1992. These morgues possess enormous value as visual evidence of the development of communities, and society in general. The London Free Press serves a market of around a million people in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. The Collection’s current custodian, the University of Western Ontario Archives and Special Collections, is in the process of transforming it from a purely physical entity to a digital resource of great research potential. To place the case study in a broader context, the author reviews some of the recent literature on the topic of newspaper photograph morgues. He then delves into a detailed description of the custodial history of the Collection as well as details about current collection management issues, including metadata and digitization. The author concludes that the digitized body of tens of thousands of unique images will be more than enough to satisfy many visual researchers and could form part of a North American digital photojournalism archive of immense historical value.

scholarly journals Twist-hands and shuttle-kissing

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Penny ◽  
Tom Fisher
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
Automated Manufacturing ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Know How ◽  
Embedded Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Automated Tools

This paper seeks to understand the skills of operating automated manufacturing machines of the C19th as craft practices, employing externally powered and automated tools around which new cultures of practice emerged. We draw upon situated/embodied/enactive/extended/distributed (SEEED) approaches to cognition to explicate the sensibilities of these practices, as well as the history of science and technology, Anthropology, STS and related fields. Our case study is a body of work focused on embodied/ embedded knowledge in the textile industry – specifically in the making of machine lace. We conclude with a proposal for multi-modal museum exhibits that provide an understanding of know-how, kinesthetic/proprioceptive skills and procedures. The authors are both long term practitioners of crafts, both traditional and industrial (see bios). This experience informs the research at every step.

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