“Translational History: A Useful Metaphor for Some Kinds of “Alt-Ac” Work?”

Roger Turner (Chemical Heritage Foundation)

Over the last two decades, “translational medicine” has become a significant concept guiding forms of biomedical practice. For some practitioners, translational medicine means effectively adapting research into treatment practices. For others, translational medicine is about making sure research and new treatments actually reach the patients for whom they are intended. I believe the metaphor of “translational history” can be useful to historians of science, particularly those engaged in “alternative academic” careers—using their knowledge in tasks rarely experienced in typical Ph.D. programs. My presentation draws upon my work doing digital humanities at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, as a contract historian, and in curating PicturingMeteorology.com.

Translational medicine is commonly understood to have three characteristics: it is collaborative, interdisciplinary, and seeks to move knowledge from “bench-to-bedside.” Similar characteristics describe effective forms of alt-ac work. At CHF, I collaborate with a team of people to translate scholarly historical research into a documentary film, and a digital interactive experience somewhere between a role-playing game and an online museum exhibition. I work with digital media producers, an exhibit designer, and a film director, advised by retired natural scientists and instrumentation engineers. We seek not to popularize scholarly findings, but to deliver them to carefully defined audiences in order to stimulate interest in history and the social relations of science. I argue that translational history can help us to make our knowledge more widely accessible, more useful to particular audiences, and more societally impactful.

“The Memex Realized: Open Notes Databases Improve Historical Research and Pedagogy”

John Stewart (University of Oklahoma)

In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an article for The Atlantic called “As We May Think,” in which he imagined a machine called the Memex. This desk shaped machine would display texts and record notes made by the user with a special stylus. The Memex would also record meta-data noting connections between various sources, storing all of this information on removable cards.

While the stylus-touch interfaces of modern tablets and the proliferation of online media fulfill much of Bush’s technological vision, the underlying epistemic concept put forth by Bush has been largely neglected. Bush said, “The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.” While academia is slowly moving towards open access models of publication, sharing the cognitive “scaffolding” of our theories has received far less consideration.

In this presentation, I will argue that Open notes databases are necessary to enable the collaborative epistemology and progressive pedagogy proposed by Vannevar Bush. History and humanities more generally are dominated by the single-author article and monograph, so a system built to pool research notes may seem counterintuitive. But by sharing our coffee stained notebooks, idiosyncratic excel files, and shoeboxes full of notecards, we can engage in deeper and more nuanced studies in the history of science. Without sacrificing traditional academic products, we can collectively populate searchable, interlinked reference guides that will accelerate research and model our research methodologies for the generations to come.

“An automated inquiry into the communication of a research collective in early galaxy studies (1925-1980): goals and obstacles”

Karin Pelte (Technical University Berlin)

Alongside and after the so called “Hubble-era”, island universes in empty space made place for a perplexing variety of galactic action and interaction. This fundamental change in the central astrophysical concept “galaxy”, partly brought about by the research on “multiple galaxies”, lies at the centre of my investigation. Galaxy studies, as opposed to relativistic cosmology, still remain rather uncharted territory in the historiography. However, as Joann Eisberg has pointed out, you would hardly want to speak of a 'field'. This also seems to hold true for the pertaining research collective, whose members were not centrally organized, spread across the world, largely bound to local research conditions and highly dependent on the publication of data gathered elsewhere. Hence, for want of more formal indicators and as a complement to the study, an automated analysis of their published communication over time is supposed help define the collective and identify continuities, breaks, as well as moments of stabilization or diversification of knowledge.

For this purpose, a programme was written which extracts citation data from relevant publications in the online NASA database ADS to build a citation network from. Tools such as community detection algorithms for directed networks and visualization softwares such as gephi will be applied to this network to detect such phenomena as e.g. 'topical clustering'. However, gaps in the metadata now appearing might still pose serious challenges to this kind of distant reading.

“Database Thinking and Deep Description: Designing a Digital Archive of the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS)”

Robert Crease (Stony Brook University)

Recently, research carried out at large-scale materials science facilities in the United States and elsewhere has undergone a phase transition that affected its character and culture. Research cultures at these facilities now resemble ecosystems, comprised of complex and evolving interactional chains between individuals, institutions, and the overall research environment. This project, the result of a collaboration between myself and a digital humanities researcher, is to create a digital archive to track and map these interactional chains. It is motivated by the attempt to understand the scientific processes themselves; how inquiries into nature unfold in the modern context. It makes more quantitative an analysis of alliances than, say, Latour’s actor networks, and, via a vis performance analogy, broadens the ontology of these alliances, conceiving the research floor as a “stage” where different kinds of acts unfold shaped by a range of factors not ordinarily part of the perspective of the science policymaker or administrator. This produces a more granular, and more flexibly usable, database. The project aims to enable researchers to construct suggestive thick descriptions using the database which researchers can follow up with interviews and more research. The project aims to reveal how performances fail, fields that disappear, instruments that perform narrowly or not well, etc. Initially we will surely be importing assumptions from the legacy databases that recapitulate traditional perspectives, but aim to make these assumptions revisable.