14 found
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  1.  29
    The Lab in the Museum. Or, Using New Scientific Instruments to Look at Old Scientific Instruments.Boris Jardine & Joshua Nall - 2023 - Centaurus 65 (2):261-289.
    This paper explores the use of new scientific techniques to examine collections of historic scientific apparatus and other technological artefacts. One project under discussion uses interferometry to examine the history of lens development, while another uses X-ray fluorescence to discover the kinds of materials used to make early mathematical and astronomical instruments. These methods lead to surprising findings: instruments turn out to be fake, and lens makers turn out to have been adept at solving the riddle of aperture. Although exciting, (...)
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  2.  32
    Mass-Observation, surrealist sociology, and the bathos of paperwork.Boris Jardine - 2018 - History of the Human Sciences 31 (5):52-79.
    British social survey movement ‘Mass-Observation’ (M-O) was founded in 1937 by a poet, a film-maker and an ornithologist. It purported to offer a new kind of sociology – one informed by surrealism and working with a ‘mass’ of Observers recording day-to-day interactions. Various commentators have debated the importance and precise identity of M-O in its first phase, especially in light of its combination of social science and surrealism. This article draws on new archival research, in particular into the ‘paperwork’ practices (...)
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  3.  31
    State of the field: Paper tools.Boris Jardine - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 64:53-63.
  4.  58
    The total archive: Data, subjectivity, universality.Boris Jardine & Matthew Drage - 2018 - History of the Human Sciences 31 (5):3-22.
    The complete system of knowledge is a standard trope of science fiction, a techno-utopian dream and an aesthetic ideal. It is Solomon’s House, the Encyclopaedia and the Museum. It is also an ideology – of Enlightenment, High Modernism and absolute governance. Far from ending the dream of a total archive, 20th-century positivist rationality brought it ever closer. From Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ to Mass-Observation, from the Unity of Science movement to Wikipedia, the dream of universal knowledge dies hard. As a political (...)
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  5.  21
    The social life of precision instruments: artisans’ trials in early-modern England, 1550–1700.Boris Jardine - 2024 - Annals of Science 81 (1-2):100-123.
    This paper examines the role of mathematical instrument makers in establishing a public culture of precision measurement in early-modern England. I argue that this culture was promoted through trials and demonstrations, in the context of which artisans held a privileged position. The trials described here cover land surveying, the measurement of magnetic variation, and standards of measurement for customs and excise. These trials were decisive moments in the ‘cultural biographies’ of precision instruments. I ask how it was that instrument makers (...)
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  6.  16
    How Scientific Instruments Have Changed Hands.Boris Jardine - 2018 - Annals of Science 75 (1):60-61.
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  7.  19
    Instruments of statecraft: Humphrey Cole, Elizabethan economic policy and the rise of practical mathematics.Boris Jardine - 2018 - Annals of Science 75 (4):304-329.
    ABSTRACTThis paper offers a re-interpretation of the development of practical mathematics in Elizabethan England, placing artisanal know-how and the materials of the discipline at the heart of analysis, and bringing attention to Tudor economic policy by way of historical context. A major new source for the early instrument trade is presented: a manuscript volume of Chancery Court documents c.1565–c.1603, containing details of a patent granting a monopoly on making and selling mathematical instruments, circa 1575, to an unnamed individual, identified here (...)
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  8. Turing, or : an exhibition should not mean but be.Boris Jardine - 2022 - In Jenny Bangham, Xan Chacko & Judith Kaplan (eds.), Invisible Labour in Modern Science. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
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  9.  10
    The shock of the odd.Boris Jardine - 2015 - British Journal for the History of Science 48 (2):353-356.
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  10.  19
    Between the Beagle and the barnacle: Darwin’s microscopy, 1837–1854.Boris Jardine - 2009 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40 (4):382-395.
    The discovery of a small collection of Darwin manuscripts at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science has allowed a reconsideration of Darwin’s interest in and knowledge of microscopy. Concentrating on the years between his return from the Beagle voyage and the publication of the major taxonomic work on barnacles, this paper recovers a number of important aspects of Darwin’s intellectual and practical development: on returning from the Beagle voyage he acquainted himself with the work of C. G. Ehrenberg, (...)
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  11.  18
    Erik L. Peterson, The Life Organic: The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 334. ISBN 978-0-8229-4466-9. $45.00. [REVIEW]Boris Jardine - 2017 - British Journal for the History of Science 50 (4):740-741.
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  12.  14
    Jutta Schickore, The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections, 1740–1870. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. 320. ISBN 978-0-226-73784-3. $40.00. [REVIEW]Boris Jardine - 2008 - British Journal for the History of Science 41 (3):460-462.
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  13.  20
    Marc J. Ratcliff, The Quest for the Invisible: Microscopy in the Enlightenment. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. xv+315. ISBN 978-0-7546-6150-4. £65.00. [REVIEW]Boris Jardine - 2010 - British Journal for the History of Science 43 (4):610-611.
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  14.  20
    Robert Michael Brain. The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. xxxii + 348 pp., illus., bibl., index. Seattle/London: University of Washington Press, 2015. $50. [REVIEW]Boris Jardine - 2016 - Isis 107 (4):867-868.
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