Things and the archives of recent 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,
References (28)
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