Happy 90th birthday to the amazing Dr. Jane Goodall, born #OTD (3 Apr 1934). Here’s a display about her childhood nature club with a cool drawing, from the 2020 Becoming Jane exhbition at the National Geographic Museum:
"The still current term #Caucasian connects directly to collective degradation, in the form of the gendered, eastern slave trade, via the network of learned societies that so deeply influenced the #historyOfScience in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."
If you're interested in what the history of science has to say about AI, have a look at this series of eight short films made by Paul Sen (a brilliant director I made TV with years ago), interviewing Simon Schaffer (prof of the history of science at Cambridge). Trailer here, and the first weekly film is just out:
#FinishedReading this #HistoryOfScience on the non- Western contribution to science from 1450 on; stories range from brutal exploitation of indigenous biological knowledge to scientists like SN Bose who worked in more collaborative and acknowledged ways. Prose is a little pedestrian and academic but the material is really interesting. Not impressed with the erasure of Rutherford's New Zealand nationality though! #Bookstodon@bookstodon
#STEM#HistoryOfScience#LaborHistory: "This introduction to the Focus section “Let’s Get to Work: Bringing Labor History and the History of Science Together” considers the need for and implications of a labor history of science. What would the broad contours of such an approach be? And what new insights, into both the past and the present, could be revealed? The contributions to this Focus section show how a labor history of science broadens our understanding of the practice and practitioners of science. They also use these historical narratives recursively, to reflect on the practice of doing history of science. And they suggest that we come up short in our obligations to the labor of our field’s past and present. This introduction offers a brief overview of the points of intersection between the fields of labor history and history of science and indicates where these intersections might be more profitably developed."
📖 2023's second issue of #HoST — Journal of History of Science is now online. The theme is "Social History of Science and Historiography: Where are We in Brazil?".
Here is a panoramic intellectual history that begins in ancient Greece, ranges across the entire span of Western philosophy and science, and ends with the first direct visual proof of the atom's existence.
🆕 Hoje começa a Semana da Ciência e Tecnologia e, com ela, nós inauguramos a exposição fotográfica "PHONLAB: repensar centros e periferias científicas no século XX" na Universidade de Évora.
Na sexta-feira, Dia Nacional da Cultura Científica, terá lugar uma visita guiada. Vagas limitadas!
✍️ HoST — Journal of History of Science and Technology, has opened a call for thematic dossiers to be published in 2025.
#HoST encourages submissions of original historical research exploring the cultural, social and political dimensions of science, technology, and medicine (#STM), both from a local and a global perspective.
📅 Proposals should be submitted by 20 January 2024.
to many, bds (boycott, divestment and sanctions) seems rather obscure > nevertheless, there is one particular field of studies where bds made a drastic impact - and bds did more damage than good
it was about twenty years ago that mona baker, a renowned scholar in translation studies, severed all ties with scholars from israel > this event proved nothing short of a catastrophe, putting the blame for wrongdoings of the israeli government on progressive scholars like gideon toury and itamar even-zohar
mona baker has kept some record of the early correspondence between her and gideon toury, and it's accessible here > it is worth reading, as this correspondence happened at a time when the global south for the very first time took the lead within an academic discipline - translation studies
❗️The applications for a Junior Researcher position for the project "KNOW-AFRICA - Knowledge networks in 19th century Africa", coordinated by Sara Albuquerque at the University of Évora, closes on 20 November.
This article (from 2021) is infuriating on the unwillingness of Very Important Scientists to reconsider their categories and recognize that #CovidIsAirborne during the crucial first phase of the pandemic, and illuminating on how the work of #histodons can help scientists understand how their categories came to be.
The description of the historical work is fascinating - and, of course, leads to a #Chortlemuffin.
Grinding up vulture brain, mixing it with oil and inserting it into the nose to cure head pain sounds ridiculous to us.
But that sort of medieval medicine actually represents a huge advance: acceptance of the logic that humans could use our brains to try things to cure disease -- and to the monks who wrote the recipe, acceptance of a responsibility to God to take care of human bodies.
Not the importance of 'top down' idealizations in Gauss's proof — these are essential even for the most empirical and 'bottom-up' of concerns: error in data collection.