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This essay explores the material imperatives of nineteenth-century statistical ambition, at a time when the nature of paper itself underwent rapid change. It expands the concept of paper technologies to include knowledge about the materials themselves, as well as the infrastructures, techniques, and agreements that made it possible for the right kind of paper to be made available for particular purposes. Taking the production of the forms for the Prussian census as a case in point, it argues that the enumeration effort of Prussian census statisticians went far beyond designing a form, collecting information, noting and compiling figures, or creating tables. Paper knowledge to define and control the material substance of the forms mattered as much as political impetus and statistical methods in getting the census right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay draws on ideas from the history of the natural sciences—on "personae" and "paper technology"—to explain how the subculture of social anthropology emerged at the London School of Economics in the 1930s. It argues that the figure of the social anthropologist coalesced around a number of practices and symbols that Bronislaw Malinowski had done much to imbue with charisma and that his students attempted to reproduce in their own research. Historians have proposed that part of social anthropology's success lay in its practitioners' ability to foster a fictive individualism in their writing, cultivating an inward attitude of experience founded on acts of the self upon the self. This essay shows that the kind of knowledge produced in Malinowski's seminar was, in fact, a highly sociable, rather than an individualistic, affair. Social anthropologists in the 1930s constructed a mutually constitutive relationship of field and seminar. These were connected spaces, held together in the act of fieldwork—a practice that transcended and linked the geographical distance between the metropole and the periphery in the crucial years of the discipline's development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces Turing’s idea of a “paper machine” to identify and understand one important mode of clinical research in the modern hospital, how that research worked, and how office technology and industrialized labor shaped and helped drive it. The unusually rich archives of Berlin psychiatry allow detailed reconstruction of the making of the new diagnostic category “hyperkinetic syndrome” in the 1920s. From the generating of data to the processing of information to the visualizing of the nature and course of the new syndrome in the lives of more than sixty patients, this case study shows how clinical research could be based on the apparatus of the clerks’ room (folders, registers, inventories, and the dispatch of documents), office technologies (new filing systems, preprinted forms, and duplicating machines), and the principles and paper practices of the division and rationalization of labor (charts organizing worktime in complex organizations). The result is an important example of clinical research embedded in the broader history of office technology, industrial labor, and the modern hospital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narratives of supply chains and raw materials are a poor fit for early modern Europeans' "thrifty" habit of reusing and reworking goods into new forms. This essay stresses the importance of such habits for early modern work using the example of paper, as a medium, instrument, and epistemic resource in various domestic and scientific spheres. Thrifty perspectives challenge not only linear supply narratives but also enduring accounts of the identities of materials themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the history of archives has opened up rich possibilities for understanding early modern science and medicine in material terms. Yet two strands of inquiry, vital to understanding the development of science and medicine as "paper knowledge," have been left largely unpursued: the archiving of personal papers, as distinct from the formation of institutional archives; and the ways in which printed books and archival papers functioned in relation to each other. This essay brings these two strands to the forefront, considering in particular books published posthumously from the notes and correspondence left behind by Nicholas Culpeper, a popular mid- seventeenth-century English vernacular medical author, and John Ray, naturalist and Fellow of the Royal Society. Culpeper's and Ray's cases illustrate, in particular, the central role of women in preserving, circulating, and certifying the authenticity of medical and scientific papers and of any books published posthumously from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the processes behind the publication of physics papers in two British journals in the 1920s: the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Series A and the Philosophical Magazine. On the surface, it looked as though the Philosophical Magazine was managed very informally, while the Proceedings had in place a seemingly rigid system of committee approval and peer review. This essay shows, however, that in practice the two journals were both influenced by networks of expertise that afforded small groups of physicists considerable control over the content of these prestigious scientific publications. This study explores the nature of peer review, suggesting how a historical approach can contribute to contemporary debates. In studying these relationships, the essay also considers the interplay of "classical" and "modern" ideas and physicists in 1920s Britain and cautions against an anachronistic approach to this classification [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a significant challenge to countries worldwide, and South Asia has not been an exception. The region is home to over 1.8 billion people and some of the world's largest cities, making it a potential hotspot for the virus's spread. This paper presents case studies from three South Asian countries: India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, analyzing their response to the pandemic and the measures taken to contain its spread. The paper analyzes India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka's healthcare infrastructures, their strengths and weaknesses, and the measures taken by these governments to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on the economy and society. Overall, the paper provides insights into the response to the pandemic in South Asia, highlighting the successes and challenges faced by the countries analyzed. The case studies offer valuable lessons on the importance of preparedness, effective communication, and coordinated responses to pandemics. They also underscore the need for greater investment in healthcare infrastructure and the importance of addressing socioeconomic disparities to effectively combat pandemics in the region. This paper also brings together the recent publications on the current pandemic to help understand the recent works in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of recent literature on the history of epidemics in East Asia, with a primary focus on modern and contemporary China, but including some discussion of the scholarship in English on epidemics in Korea and Japan. Key research strands are identified within the field: local and regional histories, disease biographies, histories of public health campaigns, global connections, and cultural representations. The paper argues that studies of epidemic disease have been central to debates about East Asian modernity, transformations of the state, the formation of a post-imperial citizenry, postcolonial science and technology studies, and East Asia's role in globalizing processes. The paper concludes by reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic and the issues it raises for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Terry Cook's famous challenge to the relationship of historians to the archive, this comment responds to the four preceding Focus essays, offering an examination of the roles, in particular, of acquisition and appraisal, canon formation, and place or location in the relationship that historians of science have with the archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1947, the Cornell psychiatrist Keeve Brodman and a handful of colleagues began developing what would become one of the most widely used health questionnaires of its time—the Cornell Medical Index (CMI). A rigidly standardized form, the CMI presented 195 yes-no questions designed to capture the health status of "the total patient." Over the following decades, Brodman's project of standardizing medical history taking gradually evolved into a project of mathematizing and computerizing diagnosis: out of the CMI grew the Medical Data Screen (MDS), one of the first computerized methods of deriving diagnoses from patient data. This essay follows the life course of these tools through the second half of the twentieth century. It argues for a genealogy of biomedical computing and computerized diagnosis that takes more seriously the continuities between computer-based digital practices and paper-based analog ones. The computerized MDS evolved from, and rested upon, paper data practices associated with questionnaires and surveys. The interlocking histories of the CMI and the MDS prompt a reconsideration of the material and temporal parameters within which the history of computerized medicine has conventionally been understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the Alexander von Humboldt Portal which can be found on the website of Germany's Berlin State Library, and it mentions how the portal provides access to digital facsimiles of the late naturalist and explorer von Humboldt's personal papers and American travel journals.

This paper surveys the historiography of the global response to HIV/AIDS. Since 1981, when the disease was first identified, there have been great strides in the medical and biological sciences in understanding the impact of the new virus on the human immune system. Although there is still no successful vaccine, antiretroviral (ART) treatment continues to improve the likelihood of HIV-positive people living long and healthy lives. We have also seen a few exciting cases of full recovery, which will allow scientists to explore new avenues towards a cure. Yet the AIDS pandemic is by no means over: 40 million have died and over 35 million individuals still live with HIV. More importantly, as historians and scholars in the humanities and social sciences have been pointing out since the early 1980s, HIV brought to light how non-medical factors play a critical role in a successful disease response. As the global community faces the aftermath of a new pandemic, it is timely to examine how broader social, economic, political, and cultural factors influence individual experiences of disease at local, national, international, and global scales. This essay examines how scholars have written historically about the HIV pandemic, using a variety of methods and approaches: from traditional histories of medicine to anthropologies of development. While HIV has sparked a massive corpus of historical reflection from a variety of disciplines, its contemporaneity means that "global AIDS historiography" cannot yet be described as a cohesive academic conversation. Yet what unites the scholarship, this essay argues, is its use of HIV to examine how and why post-war social and economic systems have achieved health objectives for some populations and not others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an introduction to the history of the concept of "emerging infectious diseases" (EID) and reflects on how humanities and social science scholars have interacted with it. It starts with a chronological outline of the coinage of the concept in the early 1990s in the wake of the shocks provoked by Ebola and HIV/AIDS, which disrupted the idea that the West was transitioning from a period of infectious diseases to one of chronic diseases. We argue that humanities and social science scholars in disciplines such as history, anthropology, STS, and literature studies have critically explored the concept, showing how entrenched it was in the perceptions of the US and Europe about threats posed by the rest of the globe. Moreover, we explore how scholars in the humanities have used the EID concept to comment on contemporary realities and mobilized it to create dialogues with scientists, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequently, we explore how the growing contemporary interest in EID has pushed historians to research the ontological and epistemological factors that enabled the "emergence" of diseases long before the invention of the EID concept, such as plague, Chagas disease, and sleeping sickness, as well as the factors that transformed these and other emerging diseases into pandemics. We conclude by outlining a few neglected factors in the EID literature that could be addressed: the circulation and reception of the concept outside of the West, the examination of EID as a problem for wild animals and not just for humans, and global histories of disease emergence as an epistemological and social process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The report is a summary of the History of Science Society Annual Meeting in 2023, which focused on the theme of "Shifting Standards, Creating Change." The meeting explored social justice work in response to global humanitarian crises and the Black Lives Matter movement. It featured panels and papers on topics such as the history of science, restorative projects, and diversity in the field. The report also highlights the winners of the HSS Prizes for 2023, which recognized outstanding contributions to the history of science. The award-winning books and essays cover a range of topics, including early modern European thought on extinction, the use of fish to combat malaria in colonial India, nonbinary gender, the relationship between humans and the sky, and the history of quantification. These works provide valuable insights into the intersections of science, culture, and society throughout history. [Extracted from the article]

This introduction to the Focus section "Supplied Knowledge: Resource Regimes, Materials, and Epistemic Tools" provides a framework to analyze critically the ways in which knowledge depends on material supplies. It claims that most scientific technologies of the early modern and modern periods were made possible only by the steady supply of a large variety of so-called natural resources and that the practices necessary to exploit, process, and provide these resources in the quality and quantity required were closely linked with the scientific and humanistic agendas of their time. The essays assembled here examine select epistemic tools and key materials from which these were made. This introduction shows how the essays apply different scales to reveal the local and global values, epistemic concepts, aesthetic ideals, social systems, (geo)political constellations, and economic frameworks that have co-constituted the making of scientific instruments, artifacts, and knowledge in and beyond the Global North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French botanist Michel Adanson spent five years in precolonial Senegal in the 1750s, under the auspices of the Compagnie des Indes. This essay follows the archival traces of Adanson's engagement with African indigo, including experiments conducted in an ad hoc "laboratory" near the French fort of Saint Louis. A reconstruction of these experiments exposes the multifarious connections to and from the island garden-laboratory, mediated by materials and different kinds of indigo knowledge, including that of local Wolof informants. A microhistory of encounters in and around a tiny island off the West African coast merges with a transatlantic story connecting Senegal to Paris and to French colonies in the Caribbean (Saint-Domingue and Guyana). The essay explores geographies of knowledge and French imperial ambitions through close attention to the material properties of indigo, the practices associated with its cultivation and transformation from plant to dye, and the material remnants of Adanson's engagement with it in Africa. These remnants—herbarium sheets, experimental notes, color samples on paper strips, dyed fabric swatches, sketched maps, correspondence, collection catalogues, and plant taxonomies—put various kinds of African knowledge and Caribbean plantation experience into dialogue with European botany and dye chemistry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the physicist John Tyndall's journal writing in the mid-nineteenth century and focuses on how Tyndall used his journal during a series of transitions that occurred when he was a young man: when he went from being a surveyor to a public school instructor and then from a Ph.D. student and budding experimenter in Germany to Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution in London. As well as providing insight into these various transitions, the journal more importantly shows how Tyndall developed a particular ethical conception of self, based on his readings of Carlyle, Emerson, and Fichte, and how that sense of self shaped—and was shaped by—his early experimental practices. Thus, the article is a case study in the development of a particular scientific self that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, whose novel claim to authority was based on a particular fusion of the ethical and the epistemological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Project Chariot, one of the first planned nuclear excavation experiments of the Atomic Energy Commission's Plowshare program, touched off a controversy over its safety that drew in two prominent American biologists, Paul Sears and Barry Commoner, both now known mainly for their roles as environmental advocates. However, Sears, the ecologist and well-established conservationist, supported Project Chariot and the Plowshare program in general, while Commoner, unacquainted with ecology at the time, strongly opposed it. A close study of their different responses to this project provides insights into the tensions and pressures on scientists during this critical period of the Cold War, 1960–1961, when fear of nuclear war and concerns over radioactive fallout from bomb tests mixed with hopes for peaceful applications of nuclear energy and the environmental movement had not yet begun. For Sears, the close connections in the United States between the science of ecology and the Atomic Energy Commission may well have played a significant role in his support for Chariot, while for Commoner, Project Chariot turned out to be his epiphany moment, the incident that transformed him from an antinuclear activist into an environmentalist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, historians of archives have paid increasingly careful attention to the development of state, colonial, religious, and corporate archives in the early modern period, arguing that power (of various kinds) was mediated and extended through material writing practices in and around archives. The history of early modern science, likewise, has tracked the production of scientific knowledge through the inscription and circulation of written records within and between laboratories, libraries, homes, and public spaces, such as coffeehouses and bookshops. This Focus section interrogates these two bodies of scholarship against each other. The contributors ask how archival digitization is transforming historical practice; how awareness of archival histories can help us to reconceptualize our work as historians of science; how an archive's layered purposes, built up over centuries of record keeping, can shape the historical narratives we write; and how scientific knowledge emerging from archives gained authority and authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution argues that the study of early modern archives suggests a new agenda for historians of early modern science. While in recent years historians of science have begun to direct increased attention toward the collections amassed by figures and institutions traditionally portrayed as proto-scientific, archives proliferated across early modern Europe, emerging as powerful tools for creating knowledge in politics, history, and law as well as natural philosophy, botany, and more. The essay investigates the methods of production, collection, organization, and manipulation used by English statesmen and Crown officers such as Keeper of the State Papers Thomas Wilson and Secretary of State Joseph Williamson to govern their disorderly collections. Their methods, it is shown, were shared with contemporaries seeking to generate and manage other troves of evidence and in fact reflect a complex ecosystem of imitation and exchange across fields of inquiry. These commonalities suggest that historians of science should look beyond the ancestors of modern scientific disciplines to examine how practices of producing knowledge emerged and migrated throughout cultures of learning in Europe and beyond. Creating such a map of knowledge production and exchange, the essay concludes, would provide a renewed and expansive ambition for the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the most fruitful place for historians of science to look for and investigate science’s imagined pasts is in the literature reviews and bibliographies of scientific papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pasteur Institute of Iran underwent a major expansion of its research productivity and international recognition during some of the most significant events of modern Iranian history: the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, followed by the Anglo-American coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. During this period, the institute's French director, Marcel Baltazard, was embedded in a complex set of working relationships with his Iranian employees, research subjects, and government ministers; American scientists and foreign aid workers; and French Pasteurians and diplomats. Baltazard constantly described these relationships as instances of "collaboration." The temporal and geographical context demands a critical reading of scientific collaboration alongside the negative implications of political collaboration. Investigating the political commitments and social attitudes of the French director and Iranian staff, this essay demonstrates that scientific collaboration at the institute both reinforced socioeconomic inequalities within Iran and mirrored global Cold War geopolitics that undermined Iranian sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the humanities and the sciences have a closely connected history, there are no general histories that bring the two fields together on an equal footing. This paper argues that there is a level at which some humanistic and scientific disciplines can be brought under a common denominator and compared. This is at the level of underlying methods, especially at the level of formalisms and rule systems used by different disciplines. The essay formally compares linguistics and computer science by noting that the same grammar formalism was used in the 1950s for describing both human and programming languages. Additionally, it examines the influence of philology on molecular biology, and vice versa, by recognizing that the tree-formalism and rule system used for text reconstruction was also employed in DNA genetics. It also shows that rule systems for source criticism in history are used in forensic science, evidence-based medicine, and jurisprudence. This paper thus opens up a new comparative approach within which the histories of the humanities and the sciences can be examined on a common level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1946 General Dwight Eisenhower, the Army Chief of Staff, established the Research and Development (R&D) Division on the War Department General Staff to expedite major technological breakthroughs in weapons technology. This goal, based on the separation of the management of R&D from procurement, captured the Army's preference for qualitative rather than quantitative superiority on the battlefield, but it threatened to upend entrenched methods of incremental product improvement under way in the Army's supply organizations, collectively called the technical services. The division's brief existence (it ceased operations in 1947) contrasted sharply with the longevity of the Ordnance Department's in-house manufacturing arsenals; for more than a century they had exploited synergies between R&D and production to turn out new weapons mass-produced in industry. The history of the R&D Division and the corresponding management of technological innovation in the technical services broadens an otherwise narrow historiographical interpretation of postwar knowledge production in the United States that is still focused heavily on the moral and political economy of military-funded academic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A translator and her science consultant, who have worked together on many books, consider the problems of translating primary and secondary texts in science. Various problems encountered in translating an ongoing documentary edition in the history of science are discussed using the collected works of Albert Einstein as a test case. For instance, each language has its own preferred sentence structure; moreover, not every historical term finds a perfect equivalent in modern usage, and historical accuracy is contextually bounded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the history of refereeing at specialist scientific journals and at funding bodies and shows that it was only in the late twentieth century that peer review came to be seen as a process central to scientific practice. Throughout the nineteenth century and into much of the twentieth, external referee reports were considered an optional part of journal editing or grant making. The idea that refereeing is a requirement for scientific legitimacy seems to have arisen first in the Cold War United States. In the 1970s, in the wake of a series of attacks on scientific funding, American scientists faced a dilemma: there was increasing pressure for science to be accountable to those who funded it, but scientists wanted to ensure their continuing influence over funding decisions. Scientists and their supporters cast expert refereeing—or “peer review,” as it was increasingly called—as the crucial process that ensured the credibility of science as a whole. Taking funding decisions out of expert hands, they argued, would be a corruption of science itself. This public elevation of peer review both reinforced and spread the belief that only peer-reviewed science was scientifically legitimate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the 1920s, inspired by the work of Ivan Pavlov, many American psychiatrists, physiologists, and psychologists turned to the animal laboratory. Focusing on the work of W. Horsley Gantt, this essay will explore the use of the conditional reflex method in the study of “experimental neurosis.” Concentrating on the interaction between thought and material operations in Gantt’s Pavlovian Laboratory, the essay will show how idiosyncratic emotional reactions and behaviors among experimental animals were used to address the issue of individuality in science, medicine, and society. It was through working with the dog that individuality was identified as an incessant problem that could be utilized in laboratory practice, as a necessary focus of psychiatric medicine, and as a means of defending science from excessive determinism and stereotyped thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the annual meeting of History of Science Society (HSS) from 9-12 November, 2017 in Toronto, Ontario. Information included some notes on meeting attendance provided by the executive office, organization website at https://hssonline .org/meetings/2017-hss-annual-meeting/#callforpapers for references, and list of HSS prizes for 2017.

This essay argues for taking fieldwork seriously, but not too seriously. It focuses on geologists and geomorphologists in the United States in the post–World War II decades who used irony, satire, and self-conscious staging to negotiate the contradictions between the tradition of frontier fieldwork that they had inherited from the late nineteenth century and the realities of mid-twentieth-century fieldwork, which they often found hard to fit into the heroic mold. Poking fun at the fieldwork tradition, the essay argues, helped them claim that tradition as their own even while constructing new scientific personas and practices that diverged from it in a number of ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spedding-Ellis-Heath edition of The Works of Francis Bacon appeared in seven volumes between 1857 and 1859. Both a monument to Victorian scholarship and a staple of the history of science, this classic and historically significant work has been the authoritative edition of Bacon's oeuvre ever since. This essay tells part of the story of its creation, reception, and influence. It describes the origin of and plan for the edition and, focusing on the three philosophical volumes, examines in detail the collaboration between James Spedding and Robert Leslie Ellis. On the basis of fresh archival research, it is shown that Spedding and Ellis disagreed fundamentally about the very thing their new edition was meant to settle: the correct interpretation of Bacon's philosophical writings and of the role of his famous inductive method in the development of modern science from the time of Newton. With the Works , Spedding and Ellis did more than furnish what was long believed to be the Baconian canon; they also (at least in part unwittingly) produced a valuable primary source for the history of nineteenth-century Baconianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information is provided on the 2016 History of Science Society Annual Meeting. Topics, including membership in the Society, science news, biomedical science, roundtable discussions, meeting attendance and the awarding the Nathan Reingold Prize for the article “Nature Doth Not Work by Election: John Wallis (1616–1703) on Natural and Divine Action,” by Adam Richter, are discussed.

This essay focuses on the reuse of film footage from a 1920s German hydrodynamics laboratory in U.S. science education films of the 1960s. By pointing out how these U.S. science education films were seen as a means of recruitment in the Cold War, it makes a case for the power of film as a medium of knowledge circulation with the ability to bridge geographical, chronological, and political gaps. The old footage of flow experiments served as a convenient tool to mobilize people for aerodynamic research. This reuse thus shows that research films were not only used to render visible something that is usually not visible to the human eye, but also for engaging people to serve the government. This essay argues that searching for such reuses of research films can enrich our understanding of the way laboratory traces actually make their way into education, society, and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The starting point of this essay is a short film of an optical effect, published in 1998 by the Institute for Scientific Film (Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film [IWF]) as part of a series showing important psychological stimulus images. It traces the stimulus images in the film back to their source in a different medium and then forward through a still ongoing series of remakes. This series of cross-media remakings illustrates the frequent occurrence of remaking—rather than reusing—images in science and the role of interactivity as an epistemic value. The essay introduces the notion of the action context , a category based on a historical actor's understanding of perception and related to the concept of affordances , to help us understand the historical value of remaking and its consequences for scientific and historiographical replication. This research is based on new archival materials—including a scientific film by Albert Michotte and Charles Dekeukeleire that is here introduced to scholarship for the first time—as well as on live interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay investigates time-lapse cinematography as a hybrid, intermedial practice. To interrogate practices of authorship, publication, copying, storage, and especially distribution, it recovers the history of The Embryonic Development of Drosophila melanogaster , a film made by Eric Lucey at the University of Edinburgh in 1956. An unusually rich archive makes it possible to recover uses and reuses of time-lapse footage in research, teaching, and other forms of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians are increasingly working with material that is not only digital but has been digitized. Early digitization projects aimed to encode data for systematic analysis; more recent projects have sought to reproduce unique archival material in a manner that allows for open-ended historical inquiry without the need to travel to archives and manipulate physical objects. Such projects have undeniable benefits for the preservation of documents and access to them. Yet historians must be aware of the scope of digitization, the reasons why material is chosen to be digitized, and limitations on the dissemination of digitized sources. Furthermore, some physical aspects of sources, and of collections of sources, are lost in their digital simulacra. Nonetheless, digitization and the standardization of metadata offer significant possibilities for future archival research and documentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than three decades, fierce debates raged both in private letters and across public spaces over a formula expressed in 1864 by the French geometer Michel Chasles. Proofs and refutations thereof abounded, to no avail: the formula was too useful to be abandoned by its defenders, too elusive to be made rigorous for its detractors. The disputes over Chasles's formula would not be solved by a definitive proof or rebuttal; rather, the core epistemic issues at stake shifted from generality to rigor and from truth to geometrical significance. This essay tracks the main lines of circulation of Chasles's formula and shows how the disputes to which it gave rise embody conflicting mathematical selves —that is to say, different normative accounts of what being a mathematician entails. This perspective allows for a renewed understanding of what historians have described as the conflicted rise of modernism in mathematics and a firmer rooting of it within broader late nineteenth-century cultural trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nineteenth-century globalizing world of colonial expansion and maritime trade, systematic study of ocean currents and winds became of increased concern in various seafaring nations. Both naval officers and university professors engaged in maritime meteorological and hydrographic research. In order to attract the attention of the state and obtain support for establishment of national scientific institutes, university professors teamed up with naval officers in building networks for maritime data collection, thus connecting practical utility to academic credentials. This paper looks into the combined efforts of the U.S. Navy lieutenant M. F. Maury and the Dutch naval officer M. H. Jansen in organizing the 1853 International Maritime Conference in Brussels, which aimed to develop a worldwide system of uniform atmospheric and marine observations. Such efforts, however, amounted to walking a tightrope between mutual interests and personal rivalries. The alliance between elite scientists and naval officers proved to be only temporary. Once the meteorological institutes were established, academically trained meteorologists gradually marginalized the role of naval officers in scientific research at the institutes, thereby establishing and securing their authority in maritime science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many historians have traced the accumulation of scientific archives via communication networks. Engines for communication in early modernity have included trade, the extrapolitical Republic of Letters, religious enthusiasm, and the centralization of large emerging information states. The communication between Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, Duke Friedrich III of Gottorf-Holstein, and his key agent in England, Frederick Clodius, points to a less obvious but no less important impetus--the international negotiations of smaller states. Smaller states shaped communication networks in an international (albeit politically and religiously slanted) direction. Their networks of negotiation contributed to the internationalization of emerging science through a political and religious concept of shared interest. While interest has been central to social studies of science, interest itself has not often been historicized within the history of science. This case study demonstrates the co-production of science and society by tracing how period concepts of interest made science international. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the history of normality's development through a photographic research program that itself began with a critique of that very concept. In the 1920s, a group of child development researchers around the psychologist and physician Arnold Gesell constructed the photographic dome—at once laboratory, observatory, and film studio—to assess normal mental development. Although seeking to challenge standardized measurements of the normal, the researchers created a set of developmental norms that shaped a universal understanding of what constituted a normal child. This essay examines the foundation of this pervasive knowledge by tracking the material factors of visual technology and media production: organizing scientific research like film production, Gesell and his team began to think of development in photographic sequences. Film technology configured their ideas about the individuality of every child, gave rise to a democratic variety of norms, and linked the scientific laboratory with private households and public life. The essay thus argues that visual technologies, beyond merely providing a scientific method and a means of popular distribution, constituted far-reaching theories regarding the normal child. This media-material perspective demonstrates that focusing on visual technologies in science can help to denaturalize knowledge about human nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]