Things and the archives of recent sciences

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Highlights

  • Understanding science as practice challenges established notions of what constitutes a scientific archive.

  • In the history of science there is a renewed attention to things.

  • Many of the challenges of working with material artefacts are institutional.

  • Digitalisation can help overcome the institutional separation of paper records and object collections.

Abstract

With the interest in studying science as practice came an interest in the material artefacts and things that form part of scientific activities in the laboratory, the field, the classroom, or the political arena. This shift in interest in connection with new modes of knowledge production raises new questions regarding the “archive” of science: what should be preserved and where to make it possible to reconstruct scientific practices in the desired detail? While digital media may be able to bridge some of the traditional divisions between the collection of scientific artefacts in museums and the written archival depositories, the move to performing science in silico produces new challenges in respect to establishing the material archives of current science. The paper will discuss these and related questions with special reference to the archives of the contemporary life sciences.

Section snippets

Practices and things

Two volumes on the historiography of contemporary science published by Thomas Söderqvist—the second one in collaboration with Richard Doel—ten years apart (1997 and 2006) provide a convenient point of entry to reflect on the specificities of recent science (even considering that the object is a moving target) (Doel and Söderqvist, 2006, Söderqvist, 1997). The essays, all written by historians engaged in studying post-World War II science, covered a great many salient topics: the explosive

Things, archives and museums

Much has been said about the distinctiveness of post-World War II science that supposedly makes it difficult to collect or display: the scale of its instrumentation (think of a proton accelerator or an early electronic computer); the fact that much of the working of the instrumentation is black boxed and does not provide easy clues to its function; the speed with which instrumentation becomes obsolete; the scale and distributed character of modern science and the many worlds scientists inhabit.

Science in silico

What happens to the material culture of science and its material heritage in the age of digitalisation? Is our interest in “things” perhaps mostly nostalgic of a pre-digital era at a moment when much science happens in silico?

We should remember that although computers are ubiquitous and play a role in nearly every aspect of research, there are still a lot of other “things” that clutter laboratory benches, pack fridges and cold storage rooms, hum away in instrumentation rooms and service tracts,

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