Logan Lounge

Workshop Schedule for Spring 2008

2008-01-13T13:16:00.000-05:00

HSSC Spring 2008 Workshops (from the Dept. website)

Full schedule of the workshops offered by the Department of History and Sociology of Science in Spring 2008.

This semester workshops will be held Mondays from 3:30 pm until 5:15pm in 337 Logan Hall, with refreshments to follow. Please note the time change!

January 28*CANCELED*

February 4Michael Leja, University of Pennsylvania "Eakins, Science, and Realism"

February 11Sarah Kaplan, University of Pennsylvania“Projecting the Future: The Temporality of Strategy Making”

February 18 Gino Segre, University of Pennsylvania“A 1932 Physics Meeting at Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Institute”

February 25 Paul Burnett, University of Pennsylvania“Extending Agricultural Extension: Theodore W. Schultz, International Development and Political Economy in the Cold War US”

March 3 Shobita Parthasarathy, University of Michigan"Between Human and Technology: Governing Biotechnology at the Patent Office"

March 10 No Workshop (Spring Break)

March 17 Karl Appuhn, NYU“Nature's Republic or Republican Nature? Venetian Forest Management and European Ideas about Nature in the Seventeenth Century"

March 24Janet Golden, Rutgers University"Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome"

March 31 Leila Zenderland, California State University, Fullerton"Anthropology, Psychology, and International Politics in the 1930s: Reconsidering Yale’s Seminar on the Impact of Culture on Personality'”

April 7 Oliver Gaycken, Temple University“A Modern Cabinet of Curiosities: George Kleine and the Educational Film”

April 14Sherry Turkle, MIT"Cyberintimacies/Cybersolitudes"

April 21 Susan Lederer, Yale University“Henry Beecher's ‘Bombshell’: Research Ethics and Omissions circa 1966”

April 28 Sarah Tracy, University of Oklahoma"High Life: Ancel Keys, Human Fatigue, and the International High Altitude Expedition of 1935"

Fall 2007 Workshop Schedule

2007-09-17T16:52:00.000-04:00

Fall 2007 Workshops

Mondays from 4pm until 6pm in 337 Logan Hall (unless otherwise noted)

September 10 Matthew Eddy, Durham University, "Reading Practices and Natural History Texts in Enlightenment Edinburgh"

September 24 Simon Cole, University of California, Irvine, "Crime, Privacy, & Identity in the Age of Genetics & Information Technology"

October 1 Babak Ashrafi, Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science (PACHS), "Born's Bad Bet"

October 8 Bruno Strasser, Yale University, "Banking Biology: Property, Privacy and Priority in Late 20th Century Databases"

October 16, 3-6pm, Logan 402 (Tuesday) Peter Galison, Harvard University, "'SECRECY': Communicating Scholarship through Film" (Screening and Discussion)

October 26, location TBA (Friday) Joint workshop with the Philosophy Department, John Beatty, University of British Columbia, "Karl Popper, Darwinism, and Totalitarianism"

October 29 Jutta Schikore, Indiana University, "Early 19th Century Microscopy"

November 5 Wendy Kline, University of Cincinnati, "Bodies of Evidence: Activists, Patients, and the FDA Regulation of Depo Provera"

November 12 Gabriella Petrick, New York University, "Industrializing Taste: Using Science and Technology to Historicize Our Sense of Taste"

November 19 Paul Offit, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, "One Scientist's Perspectives on the History of Vaccines"

November 26 John Krige, Georgia Tech, "Technology as an Instrument of US Foreign Policy"

December 3 Paul N. Edwards, University of Michigan, "Making Global Data, Making Data Global: Climate Change and Meteorological Data Infrastructures"

Joy Rohde Wins Prize

2006-11-19T16:32:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to current Penn HSS Ph.D. student Joy Rohde, who won the Nathan Reingold Prize (for the best graduate student essay) at the History of Science Society meeting recently held in Vancouver, for her paper:

“Gray Matters: Social Scientists, Military Patronage, and Disinterested Truth in The Cold War.”

Save the Date: Conference in Honor of Rob Kohler, 10-12 May 2007

2006-10-23T12:50:00.000-04:00

"Knowing Global Environments: Field Scientists and the Multiple Scales of Nature"

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
10-12 May 2007
In honor of Robert E. Kohler
Featuring new and innovative scholarship at the intersection of environmental history and the history of science, considering knowledge at many scales beyond the local: region, state/nation, empire, and globe/world.
Hosted by the American Philosophical Society and the University of Pennsylvania

Co-organizers are Jeremy Vetter (2005 Ph.D graduate) and Susan Lindee (current HSS faculty member). Paper presenters will include a few alums of the department (Alex Checkovich, Lynn Nyhart, Helen Rozwadowski, Jeremy Vetter), along with invited junior and senior scholars from many other places. We are also featuring panel discussions with scholars from the history of science, sociology, geography, anthropology, and STS.

Fall 2006 Workshop Schedule

2006-09-10T07:50:00.000-04:00

For any curious alumni and friends of the Department, especially those who live near Philadelphia, below I am pasting the Fall 2006 workshop schedule. I understand it has been coordinated by Riki Kuklick this semester, and it looks like an excellent line-up:

*Fall 2006 Workshop*

*History & Sociology of Science, Medicine & Technology*

* *

*Mondays from 4pm until 6pm in 337 Logan Hall*

*September 11*

HSSC Opening of the Semester Extravaganza in the Logan Lounge

*September 18*

Mary Terrall, University of California Los Angles
/Birds and Bees: Natural History Practices in the 18th-Century//
/
*September 25*

Michael Lynch, Cornell University
/After Closure: /

/The Implications of DNA Evidence in Forensic Identification Science/

*October 2*: No workshop (Yom Kippur)

*October 9*

Morris Low, Johns Hopkins University
/Promoting Scientific and Technological Change in Tokyo, 1870-1930:
Museums, Industrial Exhibitions and the City/

*October 16*

Jim English, University of Pennsylvania
/Prizes, Prestige, and Money/

*October 23*: No workshop (fall break)

*October 30*

Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, University of Texas--Austin
/Crusading Epistemologies:/

/Iberian Influences in Early-Modern European Science/

*November 6*

Amy L. Fairchild, Columbia University
TBA

*November 13*

Cyrus Mody, Chemical Heritage Foundation
/Molecular Electronics in the Longue Durèe/

*November 20*

Francine Hirsh, Wisconsin
/Expert Knowledge and the Making (and Remaking) of the Soviet Union/

*November 27*

Kathy Brown, University of Pennsylvania
TBA

*December 4*

Mark Harrison, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of
Oxford
/Quarantine and the Politics of Empire:/

/India, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, c.1866-1880/

The Neo-Institutionalist Turn in Sociology of Science

2006-06-01T09:11:00.000-04:00

Here at the Max Planck Institute, we just concluded a wonderful visit by Prof. Tom Gieryn of Indiana University. Another postdoc and I invited him in order to lead an Institute-wide colloquium on the past and future relationship between the history of science and sociology of science. After reviewing his own version of the past several decades in the field, he argued that a new movement coming from mainstream sociology--which he and others call "neo-institutionalism"--is now displacing the constructivist/STS-style sociology of the 80s and 90s, at least within the United States.

How is the neo-institutionalist approach different from contructivism? As Gieryn presented it (and he admitted himself this is a necessary oversimplification), constructivist sociology of science offers case-based analysis celebrating contingency and locality, favors archival and ethnographic methods, emphasizes agency over structure, and often focuses on issues related to epistemology and knowledge. Neo-institutionalism, on the other hand, searches for patterns over time and space, is more enthusiastic about using statistical and quantitative methods, emphasizes how structure can constrain actors, and returns in part to a sociology of scientists and organizations that was more characteristic of the pre-constructivist, Mertonian era. Now, of course, there are plenty of exceptions--such as some of the Edinburgh School SSK research that connects knowledge to social structure (e.g., MacKenzie's work on the history statistics), and the sophisticated neo-institutionalist case study work done by Daniel Lee Kleinman on how the larger structural context has shaped what goes on at a Wisconsin plant pathology lab. But Gieryn's overall dichotomy did prove quite engaging and useful for our discussion at the MPI. While taking something of a middle position, Gieryn himself seemed more concerned than excited about these new trends in American sociology of science.

Both of us who co-organized the colloquium had the chance to present brief commentaries. Not surprisingly, given our many fruitful debates over the past several months, we found ourselves taking opposing points of view. My colleague, who was/is a student of Bruno Latour, the turn in American sociology away from agency-centered constructivism is not at all a welcome development, and she ably presented the case for continuing to focus on how actors of all kinds (including non-human actors) engage in construction, enrollment, and network-building. On the other hand, my talk was much more favorable towards the neo-institutionalist turn. While admitting the enduring benefits of the constructivist approach--and, indeed, continuing to work broadly in this tradition in my own work--I advocated the welcoming of a more structural, larger-scale, or institutional turn in the history and sociology of science. I argued that many recent trends in the history of science--towards the macro-scale and "big picture"--are actually tending in a sympathetic direction, and we need to place more emphasis on how actors are constrained by the historically constructed but partly stable institutional instructures--norms, power relations, etc. I do think that historians of science must involve ourselves in the neo-institutionalist turn, so that our hard-won insights about how identities, categories, and practices have changed over time can be properly incorporated into the big picture. (And of course to keep issues of knowledge/epistemology on the front burner!) Otherwise, there is certainly the risk that neo-institutionalist big pictures will lack the historical and geographical subtlety required to account for variability over time and space.

Okay, enough of my own commentary. I just wanted to summarize what Tom Gieryn had to say, because I think the issues involved will be of great interest to many in the Penn HSS community. We had a wonderful visit from Tom, and I highly commend him to anyone who has the chance to hear him give a talk sometime or to engage with him in small group discussion.

Conference at Penn This Weekend

2006-05-05T10:50:00.000-04:00

I probably should have posted this sooner, but just in case any alumni readers of this blog haven't heard yet, there is an exciting conference coordinated by Riki taking place this weekend at Penn, sponsored by the HSS Dept.:

* * *

“Histories of the Human Sciences: Different Disciplinary Perspectives.”

Conference on May 6th, 2006, University of Pennsylvania, sponsored by the Department of History and Sociology of Science.

During recent decades, interest in the history of human sciences has grown considerably. Research has been undertaken by practitioners of the human sciences as well as by historians, and also by scholars in other disciplines. Not surprisingly, scholars have typically addressed their own disciplinary audiences. The objective of this conference is to stimulate discussion across disciplinary boundaries.

Speakers: Matti Bunzl; John Carson; Susan Hegeman; Barbara Herrnstein Smith; Peter Logan; Philip Mirowski; Jill Morawski; Alice O’Connor; Leila Zenderland.

Commentators include Elizabeth Lunbeck and George W. Stocking, Jr.

Attendance space is limited. Those interested in attending the conference should declare their intention of doing so. Further particulars will be sent to them. Please send an e-mail message headed “Conference on May 6th” to Patricia Johnson, pjohnson@sas.upenn.edu.

Penn HSS Grads Lured to Central Pennsylvania

2006-05-02T04:23:00.000-04:00

I have heard from various sources now that recent-Ph.D Chloe Silverman accepted a tenure-track offer with the STS program at Penn State University, located in the State College/University Park area. Meanwhile, not far down the road, I (Jeremy Vetter) accepted an offer in the History Department at Dickinson College, located in Carlisle. I have no explanation, really, for the strange pull of central Pennsylvania for our recent Ph.D graduates, although it is certainly nice that Chloe and I will both be so close to all our friends in Philadelphia!

And Jeff Tang, whose promotion to a tenure-track position at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia was noted in an earlier message (inexplicably deleted?), will not be that far down the road either.

I left my heart at MIT Press

2006-04-27T14:34:00.000-04:00

I had breakfast this morning with an editor at MIT Press. It was an interesting time, in part because it highlighted something I never really paid much attention to: I've been a serious consumer of MIT books for some 20 years. In graduate school, I had to read a lot their science studies and history of technology books: you couldn't have an STS course syllabus without something from the Inside Technology series. Then, I went through a phase of consuming their architectural history list. More recently it's been their computer science and design books-- mainly the trade books, but a few of the more technical ones as well.

Still, when the question came up of whether I'd think about sending a proposal for the end of cyberspace book to them, I thought: yeah, the computer science and design side would be a good fit, but my loyalty is still with the STS list.

I doubt I could say such a thing about many presses. Do university presses realize that readers have these kinds of relationships with their products? That the formative experiences that scholars have with their books translates into something more than just recognition of the logo when it's spotted on a book jacket? And do they try to do anything with that?

Technorati Tags: business, postacademic

Audra Wolfe is Now an "Editor-in-Chief"

2006-03-09T11:06:00.000-05:00

In an e-mail a few weeks ago, Penn HSS grad Audra Wolfe revealed that she is leaving Rutgers University Press to join the staff of the Chemical Heritage Foundation as Editor-in-Chief. Now she doesn't have to commute to New Jersey any more! Congratulations to Audra.

The Origins of Us (i.e. Academic Researchers)

2006-02-11T11:41:00.000-05:00

Have you ever wondered about where the hallowed traditions we associate with the modern research university--lectures, oral exams, written exams, research seminars, the Ph.D., getting a professorship, library catalogs--came from? Then you might want to take a look at a very interesting new book by William Clark entitled Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

This is a fairly long book, but it is filled with lots of funny side comments and detailed examples of how the practice of university life has changed over the centuries. The focus is on the German-speaking lands in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the place and time when many of these features emerged in their modern form. But he also spends a lot of time talking about earlier practices, especially at places like Oxford and Cambridge. This is a deeply researched and delightfully eccentric book, which should be interesting to academics in many disciplines...but especially those of us in the history of science.

Clark also integrates and interprets lots of visual images along with textual sources. The result is often both insightful and amusing. Take his discussion of oral exams. For those who have recently taken oral exams, or who will be taking them soon, there are some great 18th century images (see especially Fig. 4.3 on p. 99) depicting this hallowed event. (Some of the book's illustrations are reproduced at the author's website.) And, anyway, the text is itself is often quite entertaining. For instance, check out Clark's description of one candidate's oral exam...does this bring up any memories for those who have gone through such exams?

"The candidate answered most questions by a hallowed academic strategy: silence. As the least important person in the room, the candidate fulfilled the exam's ceremonial and forensic nature by speaking least. The first two professors responded to the candidate's silence or ignorance at length, in part by giving the answers or trying to elicit them. The rhetoric indicates the exam's link with teaching as a perpetual examination, as well as its nature as professorial theater. The examiners performed as much for each other as they did for the candidate." (p. 100)

Here is just one more quotation, giving you a little bit of the feel of Clark's writing style, here in his own recounting of looking through professorial dossiers kept by German state officials:

"I love the smell of archives in the morning. After getting a whiff of a piping hot cup of fresh-brewed coffee and the morning paper (but not a German one), nothing is quite so satisfying as nosing through a big, fat Bavarian dossier." (p. 289)

How can you resist? Well, I should also point that the book does have a serious and worthwhile argument regarding the shift from oral to written cultural performance and the role of state bureaucracy and rationalization in the development of research university traditions we now regard as quaint or old-fashioned. He doesn't spend much time on what happens after the mid-19th century, alas, so the United States and the rest of the non-European world unfortunately get very little attention. (Granted, the book is already quite long and filled with rich details, so anything longer would probably be insufferable.) But for learning more about where the research university came from the early modern period to the 19th century, this is a fantastic source.

While I'm in the mood to recommend new publications, I see that Tom Gieryn has a new article on lab-field issues in the latest issue of Social Studies of Science ("City as Truth-Spot: Laboratories and Field-Sites in Urban Studies" vol. 36 [2006]: 5-38). We are planning to discuss this article in a little group we have here at the MPI. It looks promising.

There's no escaping STS

2006-01-21T00:59:00.000-05:00

Seen at the California Academy of Sciences:

An experiment on the end of cyberspace

2006-01-12T13:36:00.000-05:00

For a long time, I've been working on an article on the end of cyberspace-- the demise of the concept of "cyberspace" as a separate dimension in which information resides-- and its implications for the future of technology. (Though I've been talking publicly about it for over a year, thinking about this issue for a lot longer, it seems.)

A friend of mine and I have an article coming out in a popular magazine builds on this work: we asked a bunch of people what term they would use to describe the coming world of always-on, pervasive, interactive, mobile devices. We got some terrific responses, but because of space constraints, couldn't use them all.

I didn't want them to all go to waste, and feel like this project is taking on a bit of a life of it's own-- it's at least several articles, and maybe a short book. So I grabbed the domain name www.endofcyberspace.com, and started a blog with the same name. It's going to be part research notebook-- perfectly sensible, given how much of the primary material actually IS online-- and part sensor, picking up quivers on the subject elsewhere in the blogosphere.

Two interesting things to report on the experiment.

First of all, it's attracted a lot of attention: I've got a couple hundred visitors a day, after only a few days, and the site's been tagged by a number of del.icio.us and Technorati users. I'm actually not talking about anything that I haven't discussed at length in my personal blog; but having the domain name and greater focus on this specific subject has concentrated attention, and draw attention, in a way that surprises me.

Second, I started out by having a lot of myself on the blog-- copying things that are on my personal blog, having feed from my other blogs show up pretty prominently-- but over the last few days I've been stripping that stuff down. I've still got my name on the posts, and a link at the bottom of the blog to other places I blog (including here), but I've quickly come to feel that 1) the blog ought to be about the subject, not about me; and 2) there are a lot of other people who are interested in and writing something about this subject, and it would be more interesting to create a space that tracks and synthesizes-- and perhaps advances-- that conversation than to try to claim it for myself.

There are some interesting questions about the relationship between research, self-fashioning and collective work here, but I've got to go to a meeting. More anon.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, digital culture, history of science, postacademic, STS

History Bloggers at AHA

2006-01-11T11:02:00.000-05:00

The recent meeting of the American Historical Association in Philadelphia featured a Saturday morning session on History Blogging. At least one panelist represented the Cliopatria blog at the History News Network, which also includes links to hundreds of other history blogs. It became clear during the panel discussion that history blogging ranges widely, from specialized blogs devoted to posting source materials and research inquiries on particular subjects, to more politically opinionated blogs linking history to current issues, to more personal blogs detailing the life experiences of academics across the land.

Juan Cole, the historian of the modern Middle East at U. Michigan who is apparently the most popular history blogger in the world (as measured by page views for his blog on current issues in the region, Informed Comment), was one of the panelists, and it was interesting to see him in person. In light of Alex Pang's earlier postings regarding the possible irrationality of untenured academics spending time blogging, and my own curiosity, I asked the panel what they thought about such concerns. Most of the responses focused on the matter of blogging about controversial political issues, rather than the problem of time diversion. My sense was that some forms of blogging might be rewarded, but that many panelists had strong misgivings about jobless academics blogging under their real names about controversial issues. Cole, for example, pointed out that search committees often receive so many applications that they have to find ways to eliminate most of them from consideration--and worries about controversial blogging might antagonize one or more members of the committee. That said, he also pointed out that sticking your neck out in public is always a risk, no matter where you are in your career, so you just have to decide if you believe in public debate of important issues enough to jump in the fray. All the panelists were excited about the prospect of history blogs reaching a much wider audience than conventional academic publishing.

November Final Score: ABDs 3, Ph.Ds 1

2005-12-04T11:04:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to several current Penn graduate students who passed significant milestones in November:

Philip Cho successfully defended his dissertation entitled "Ritual and the Occult in Chinese Medicine and Religous Healing: The Development of Zhuyou Exorcism."

Meanwhile, three people passed their oral exams: Emily Pawley, Corinna Schlombs, and Andi Johnson. For their dissertation projects...

Emily will be looking at agricultural knowledge and practice in the Atlantic World during the 19th century, with possible emphases in chemistry, food & nutrition, and/or disease.

Corinna will be doing an international history of computing, combining three approaches: consumers/users, national identity, and international comparisons.

Andi is studying "elite sport as a global crossroads of science, medicine, technology and culture" (quoting from her website blurb since she is out of e-mail contact in Egypt at the moment!)

The Paper Turn?

2005-11-28T08:18:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading David Kaiser's new book, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics. Like other recent books in what one might call "the paper turn" in the history of science--Andrew Warwick's Masters of Theory, or Ursula Klein's Experiments, Models, Paper Tools, for example--Kaiser urges us to look at theoretical work on paper with the same practice-minded, analytical scrutiny as laboratory experiments or field work. These historians taking the paper turn, in my opinion, have found a good way to engage their interest in theoretical science with wider concerns in the field, and for that they should be commended.

It is interesting that all three of the books I just mentioned examine the physical sciences. Can we see similar things happening the the life sciences, earth sciences, or human sciences? (Or in medicine and technology?) Perhaps there haven't been such long-term productive paper tool systems comparable to Feynman diagrams or Berzelian chemical formulas in these fields. On the other hand, one thinks of phylogenetic trees in biology, perhaps, or kinship diagrams in social anthropology. (One might even put Rob Kohler's drosophila biologists, from Lords of the Fly, with their gene "mapping" diagrams in this category...) Any other ideas?

Professional blogging-- why do it?

2005-11-17T14:36:00.000-05:00

To continue the question of why academics-- or knowledge workers of any kind-- should blog....*

One of the key developments in blogging in the last year or two has been their evolution into tools for crafting and projecting professional identity. In a way, this just continues the vanity Web site phenomenon (remember 1998?). But it's also different in some significant ways.

For one thing, it's a lot broader: while Web sites weren't really that hard to set up, blogs have dramatically lowered the bar. The continued growth in computer ownership, and the diffusion of high-speed Internet access, meanwhile, have raised the floor. Obviously fast connections make things like photoblogging and podcasting possible; but we shouldn't discount how much easier a jump in connectivity can improve the experience of just writing words.

Another important difference is that professional blogs aren't just about being, but doing. It's not enough to describe your competence; you have to talk about your work. My favorite example in this category is English Cut, a blog written by Thomas Mahon, a bespoke Saville Row tailor. (Don't know what "bespoke" is? Find out!) I'll probably never be able to afford one of his jackets, but I find his description of the world of Saville Row, his explanations of the differences between various tailors and manufacturing methods, and the various complicated judgments tailors have to make when creating something for a client, absolutely fascinating.

It's also a great example of how many professionals have nothing to lose by talking at length about their work: as strangely compelling as I find reading about drafting patterns and worsted numbers, knowing about them will never make me a world-class tailor. Most professional work is like this: the formal stuff that you can describe is but the tip of the iceberg of your knowledge, and as often as not, the important stuff remains submerged even to you.

Mahon's blog also raises another question. For most professionals, blogs don't bring in new business. Saville Row clients aren't likely to choose bespoke over store-bought because of English Cut. Nobel laureate Gary Becker and legal scholar Richard Posner aren't going to get better jobs because they blog together; CERN physicist John Ellis isn't going to get a new atom-smasher. So why do it?

So what do professionals or knowledge workers-- scientists, academics, writers, tailors (it requires too much knowledge to be considered mere manual labor) and the like-- get out of blogs? Once you get outside the world of the A-list bloggers who attend the Berkman and O'Reilly conferences on blogging, what's motivating people to blog? How are they using the medium? I see four major patterns.

The virtual subway. For journalists and writers, blogs are a place to practice and refine their craft. As Rainer Maria Rilke put it, writers don't write because they want to; they write because they can't imagine doing anything else. For writers, blogs are to publishing as speed chess is to a formal tournament: the same basic game, but faster, edgier, and rougher in an interesting way. To invoke another metaphor, for many writers blogs are less like op-ed columns than virtual subways, a place to play for a couple hours and maybe pick up a little extra money.

Credibility = transparency. Some professionals who blog have realized that the very fact that they're blogging will impress readers. If you're willing to be so open about what you do, the logic goes, you must be good. And it's not bad reasoning. We all know that jargon and obscurity are crutches for marginal performers, and that professional poses can obscure as much as they assure. Transparency, on the other hand, is easy to understand, and easy to trust.

New court, old game. Then there are professionals-- academics and scientists, most notably-- for whom blogging is a natural extension of what they already do: network, cite each other, and argue. There are a number of high-energy physicists, string theorists, and cosmologists who are bloggers; they all seem to post extensively on each other's blogs, taking online arguments they've been having for years, or that start at a conference or colloquium and just jump to cyberspace. Charles Darwin called his Origin of Species "one long argument;" the same phrase could apply to most science. Blogs turn out to be hot-houses for disputation. If e-mail encouraged flame wars, blogs encourage intellectual feuds-- which figure prominently in academic life.

The brand of me. Finally, some use blogs to build their personal brand: to widen the reach of their ideas, to increase name familiarity, whatever you want to call it. (I almost hate to admit it, but Tom Peters' Fast Company piece, "The Brand Called You," changed me life.)

What's interesting is that in none of these cases does a blogger's online activities necessarily collide with their day job. This is a bit of a surprise, given how many bloggers are addicted to apocalyptic, disruptive innovations-saturated rhetoric: in this world-view, Rathergate, Gannongate, and Whatever-else-gate epitomize the power of blogging. (As Anil Dash and danah boyd argued, making blogging into something that gets people fired doesn't do the medium any good.) But as any smart observer of technologies will tell you, the technologies that are the biggest successes are often the ones that insinuate themselves into the workplace, recycle habits, and put old practices to new uses. Blogging is successful among professionals not because it's radically new, but because it's slightly new.

The challenge for any ambitious academic blogger, I think, it is figure out how to craft a blog that is recognizably academic in interest and content, but at the same time is satisifying to the author. Of course, that's exactly the same challenge you have when you're crafting a dissertation, or an article, or any big project: one must satisfy the dual, and sometimes conflicting, demands of professional and personal satisfaction. Perhaps learning how to balance those demands is the best reason to blog.

*This is an update of a piece I wrote for Red Herring a while ago. Since it was subscriber-only, I'm reposting it here.

Technorati Tags: blogging, university

Blogging, academic careers, and self-fashioning

2005-11-17T11:47:00.000-05:00

Thank you, thank you. It's great to be here. I've always wanted to play the lounge....

Let's start off with a question (and a slightly reworked repost from my own blog): should any of you be here? Shouldn't you be studying for your orals, or working on that paper to send to the Schuman Prize committee, or looking at the Chronicle Jobs section?

What prompts the question is an article by NYU professor Robert Boynton in Slate about the contradictory responses to blogging in the academy. It's a very interesting piece, because it manages to capture some of the cross-currents and contradictions that are bound up in academic responses to blogging. I'll highlight two.

Boynton writes:

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of academics keep blogs these days, posting everything from family pictures to scholarly works-in-progress. While few are counting on their Web publications to improve their chances at tenure, many have begun to fear that their blogs might actually harm their prospects....

Who knows about the "many." But Boynton does hit on an oft-repeated truth about academic hiring: that knowing too much about a candidate, particularly a tenure-track job candidate, can work against the candidate.

Committees, I've been told many times, agree more easily about a candidate who looks good-- who has the right credentials, a couple publications, that sort of thing-- but whose early work can be used as the foundation for any number of pleasing career trajectories is more likely to win approval from the majority than someone whose track record points in very clear directions. This is one reason the C.W. states that adjuncts are at a disadvantage in job searches at the school where they're teaching.

For a profession that puts so much weight on collegiality, you'd think that you'd want to know everything possible about a candidate. Within a couple years we're going to see people going on the job market who've had blogs for their entire graduate school careers, and whose intellectual development is laid out. Of course, completely unrestrained blogging is no smarter than acting out at a conference, or saying bad things about an advisor. Yet ironically, even though we all know how fundamentally human the experience of graduate school is-- how much of it involves making and learning from mistakes, how much of it is fraught with uncertainty, and shot through with big and petty challenges-- the fact that committees seem more comfortable with less transparency about what candidates really are like may turn acknowledging that humanity into a problem.

At the same time, while one might classify blogging as the moral equivalent of publishing your book with a vanity press, Boynton notes,

in another sense, academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university's ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called "The Conversation of Mankind"—an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture....

[M]ight blogging be subversive precisely because it makes real the very vision of intellectual life that the university has never managed to achieve?

The academic purist's response is a resounding "no." He represents one extreme of the spectrum, in which the only writing that "counts" in academic life (in the category of "publications," at least) is peer-reviewed in the traditional manner.

Boynton hits at a basic problem here. Are blogs publications, or are they conversations? If they're like peer-reviewed articles, then they're far inferior. But if they're a channel for that stream of commentary and discourse around scholarly questions and publications-- the stuff that we all swim in, whether we're presenting comments at conferences or talking shop in the hallway, or arguing in the bar-- then they should be judged using entirely different standards, and should be looked upon much more favorably. Of course, the "blogs as conversations" model doesn't win you much in the tenure race-- no one whose publications sucked ever got promoted for being good in around-the-water-cooler talk-- but it also doesn't count against you.

Further, as I've argued before, there's benefit to professional blogging when it records otherwise-ephemeral events like conferences and talks.

It certainly will be interesting to see how academic blogging evolves, and in particular whether it takes on properties or develops norms different from, say, corporate blogging or personal blogging. As a vehicle for self-fashioning and building the Brand Called You-- two things that successful academics are really good at, all protestations to the contrary-- blogs are extremely useful. The question will be, how to use the medium in ways that will satisfy both the loose conventions of good blogging, and the conventions of good academic self-presentation.

Technorati Tags: blogging, university

Alex Pang Has a Blog

2005-11-17T05:24:00.000-05:00

I've recently discovered that Penn grad Alex Pang has a blog. It's called "Relevant History" (see the new link I just added on the right-hand side of the page!) His latest posting, "Blogging, Academic Careers, and Self-Fashioning" might be of particular interest to members of this community.

Penn Party at SHOT/HSS

2005-11-01T00:57:00.000-05:00

Pat in the HSS Dept. office asked me to post the following reminder for all Penn attendees (and alums!) who will be at the SHOT/HSS meeting coming up this week:

"YES, there will be a Penn Party at the SHOT/HSS meeting in Minneapolis.>> AND, with the help of Jennifer Gunn, we have found a terrific place to > hold it.>> TRIPLE ESPRESSO Bistro and Bar, 1410 Nicollet Avenue, South. Just one > block from the Hyatt and the Millenium Hotels.>> 9-12PM, Friday night, November 4th.>> WE WILL HAVE a private room, with piano(!) and a full service bar and > bistro.>> PENN will subsidize all tabs.>> LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING YOU THERE!> Ruth Schwartz Cowan> History and Sociology of Science> University of Pennsylvania"

Also, Dominique has informed me that her session has been MOVED from Friday morning to Saturday morning. I will try to change the previous message (below) to reflect the change if possible. (Any other corrections, feel free to post a comment directly on the message, since I may not have good on-line access for the next few days...)

Penn People at HSS/SHOT

2005-10-25T00:37:00.000-04:00

For those who are attending the HSS/SHOT co-located meeting in Minneapolis (Nov. 3-6), below is a list of current and former Penn people on the program (apologies if I left anyone off!) I'm not quite sure why Friday is so overloaded with people while Saturday depends on a couple of our friends from the history department to keep from being almost completely empty of Penn presentations, but there you have it. (At least that will make it easier for most of us to enjoy the party on Friday night!) Here's the list:

NOTE: To print this list, cut and paste the text into a word-processing document...it should fit nicely on a single page, I think.

CORRECTION: Dominique's session was originally listed in the HSS newsletter for Friday morning, but it has been MOVED to Saturday morning, according to the HSS website (and Dominique herself!) I've corrected the listing below to reflect this.

SECOND CORRECTION: Jeff Tang has now been added to a Sunday morning session. For some reason, he wasn't listed in the program appearing in the SHOT newsletter, which I used to compile this list. I've added him below.

Friday
SHOT 9:00-10:30 a.m., 1st paper: Jeremy Vetter, "Knowledge and the Mining Business: The Technological Agenda of the Colorado Scientific Society"
SHOT 9:00-10:30 a.m., commentator: Fred Quivik
SHOT 9:00-10:30 a.m., commentator: Tom Zeller
SHOT 10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m., commentator: Tom Haigh
SHOT 10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m., commentator: Tom Hughes
SHOT 10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m., 2nd paper: Yasushi Sato, "Where Systems Engineering Does Not Work: A Cross-Cultural Perspective"
HSS 1:45-3:45 p.m., 3rd paper: Alex Checkovich, "Problem Areas: Regions, Representations, and Authorities in the Great Depression"
HSS 1:45-3:45 p.m., 4th paper: Susan D. Jones, "Bradford and Walpole: Exchanging Knowledge About Occupational Anthrax"
SHOT 1:45-3:45 p.m., roundtable panelist: John Staudenmaier
SHOT 1:45-3:45 p.m., chair: Amy Slaton
HSS 4:00-6:00 p.m., 3rd paper: Roger Turner, "Ways of Knowing the Weather: Aviation, University Education, and the Development of Digital Computing"
SHOT 4:00-6:00 p.m., 3rd paper: Gerard Fitzgerald, "The Handmaiden of Industry: The Development of Industrial Microbiology in the U.S. Food Industry, 1900-1950"
SHOT 4:00-6:00 p.m., chair: Ruth Schwartz Cowan

Saturday
HSS 9:00-11:45 a.m., 3rd paper: Dominique Tobbell, "Pharmaceutical Alliances: Academic-Industry-Government Networks of Drug Development and Policy in the Postwar United States"
HSS 9:00-11:45 a.m., commentator: Ruth Schwartz Cowan
HSS 9:00-11:45 a.m., commentator: Marta Hanson
SHOT 10:15-11:45 a.m., 1st paper: Lauren Nauta, "Left-Overs of the Gods: The Role of Bovine Milk and Colostrum Offerings in Autumnal Fever Therapeutics in the Punjab Plains, 1870-1930"
SHOT 1:15-3:15 p.m., 4th paper: Ian Petrie, "We recommend this vehicle to young Bengal: Bicycles and the Objects of Modernity in India, 1900-1960"
HSS 3:30-5:30 p.m., commentator: John Tresch

Sunday
SHOT 9:15-10:45 a.m., 3rd paper: John Terino, "Technology to Represent and Evaluate the Effects of Modern Airpower"
SHOT 9:15-10:45 a.m., 4th paper: Jeff Tang, “Armchair Engineering: The Empowerment of Users in High-Fidelity Audio”

Fathoming the Ocean

2005-10-08T06:08:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to Helen Rozwadowski, former Penn HSS Grad, on the recent publication of her book, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Harvard University Press, 2005). I just finished reading it, and I have to say it is fantastic (even better than the dissertation version!) This book is an excellent example of how to take good, solid history of science and turn it into something that should earn a much wider audience.

Any other newly-published books by Penn HSS Grads (or even faculty)? Feel free to post congratulations on this blog if you come across something like that...

Structure, Structure, Structure

2005-10-05T10:01:00.000-04:00

Calling all historians of technology (or sympathizers) in the Penn community. Have you ever had a sense of unease with some aspects of the Social Construction of Technology approach but weren't sure quite how to articulate your misgivings? Or you didn't want to be confused with a reactionary? (Okay, so maybe SCOT isn't the newest thing in history of technology or STS, but I think it still occupies a somewhat canonical position.) I just came across an article that, to my mind, sums up the limitations of social constructivism as it has been practiced and points out directions it needs to expand and change in order to retain its vibrancy.

To those of who have had the (is it tired?) old structure vs. agency debate with me, or the related debate over actors' vs. analysts' categories, this will all seem pretty familiar. But if you want a nice lucid account of how structure has been neglected in SCOT, why structure is vital and important (the return of power, once again!), and why non-actors' categories are essential, see Hans K. Klein & Daniel Lee Kleinman, "The Social Construction of Technology: Structural Considerations," Science, Technology, and Human Values 27 (2002): 28-52.

In my opinion, these arguments apply equally well to agency-centered, actors-category-only accounts in history more generally, including the history of science and medicine. It is also the same basic set of reasons that explain why I am uncomfortable with the Actor-Network approach in science studies, the whole notion of "co-construction" as supposedly obliterating distinctions between science and society, and so forth. I would highly recommend this article as a reading for history of technology orals lists that include sections on SCOT, as perhaps the best single source analysis of its limitations, not from a conservative or technological determinist point of view but from an emancipatory point of view that seeks to understand the larger social relevance of science.

Technoscience Special Double Issue

2005-10-01T10:15:00.000-04:00

The latest issue of Perspectives on Science (2005, no. 2) includes several very interesting articles on the broad theme of "Technoscience," originating from a conference at the Max Planck Institute (my current home!) a few years ago. Articles by Ursula Klein and Barry Barnes challenge the common view that technology and science were not brought together until the late 19th century during the dawning of "science-based industry." Another article by Wolfgang Lefevre on science as a labor process intersects with my own thinking about a "work history" of science; it may be of interest to others of you who share my interest in the history of work. The fourth essay is an attempt by Gideon Freudenthal to rehabilitate what he calls the Hessen-Grossman thesis on the relationship of early modern science to its social-economic circumstances, a thoughtful piece both as historiography and an argument about the "big picture." The next issue (no. 3) promises to contain several more papers from the same conference.

Although this journal has often seemed much too dominated by philosophy of science to attract the ongoing interest of some of us in the history and sociology of science, this particular issue is well worth a look. (And if it is any indication of the current editorial direction of Perspectives on Science, it is enough to make me want to think about submitting an article to them at some point!) It may be that one of these articles even merits discussion at a journal club or in the classroom....perhaps the one by Ursula Klein, given how much really interesting work--on the history of chemistry, no less!--she has been putting out lately. (She has her name on an office here on my floor, but I think her Independent Working Group has finished its term of operation. The MPI is advertising for a new IWG director, and moreoever I saw her listed as a visiting professor on the Harvard History of Science department website when I was browsing it the other day.)

While I'm in the mood for mentioning things I've found since coming to the MPI....The other day, a colleague here showed me one of the most fascinating books I've ever seen. It is called Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel. It is an almost 1000-page compendium of brief (4-6 page) vignettes accompanied by magazine-quality illustrations on a extremely wide range of subjects, ranging from the cultural history of early modern science to musings on voting technology and supermarkets. Authors include many familiar names from the Harvard-Cambridge(UK)-Paris-Berlin metropolitan network in History of Science/STS (including soon-to-join-Penn-faculty John Tresch!) The book is based on an installation/exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe (some kind of artsy museum-type place in Germany near the French border), which coincidentally is coming to an end this Monday. I'm not sure if the website will stay up after Oct. 3rd, but here is a link to it.

I need to get back to work now, but I do remember that today is the Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of Medicine hosted by Penn, right? Someone there should post a brief synopsis after it is all over, so those of us far away can hear about how it went.

Emily Thompson News

2005-09-20T11:43:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of former grad student Audra (who will soon be able to post her own entries!), here is a happy news item about a former HSS faculty member who taught many of us in the history of technology:

"Emily Thompson just got a MacArthur grant. Here's the blurb from salon.com's AP feed:

-- Historian Emily Thompson, 43, who teaches at the University of California at San Diego, said she might use the grant money to include a DVD with film clips in a book about the transition from silent to sound motion pictures, or to help restore an old film."

Interesting new Mirowski & VanHorn article in SSS

2005-09-19T10:45:00.000-04:00

In preparation for possibly submitting an article, I was browsing the latest issue of Social Studies of Science this morning. I only got through the first article, which was so interesting that I used up all my time before lunch just reading it:

Philip Mirowski & Robert VanHorn, "The Contract Research Organization and the Commercialization of Scientific Research," Social Studies of Science 35 (2005): 503-548.

This article will be especially of interest to those of us following the debates about changes over the past several decades in university-business relations. It might even be suitable journal club material, perhaps a better choice than the other Mirowski article I suggested a few months ago. The main subject matter is drug testing, but the authors make the claim that the new structural forces are already or will in the future be operating in several other fields as well. Even though this article is about recent stuff, I think it has some potential relevance for those of us studying longer time periods who are interested in the economics of knowledge production.

Welcome to Logan Lounge!

2005-09-19T09:58:00.000-04:00

After informal conversations with several of you about having a collective blog, I created this blog for current and former members of the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania to exchange ideas with one another whether they are in residence in Philadelphia or not. (Having just finished my degree and moved away, I have a special incentive to set up such a blog!) Of course, other people are also welcome to view the site and participate in its discussions. If you would like to be able to post new items to the blog, send me an e-mail so I can add you to the list.

As will presumably be obvious to current and recent members, this blog is called "Logan Lounge" because the Department is located in Logan Hall on the Penn campus. The 3rd floor lounge is an area where so many of our conversations take place, and this blog is meant to be an extension of the physical space into cyberspace. I chose the basic site design template that seemed to me to best resemble the furniture in the lounge. If anyone wants to change it, let me know.

What is appropriate for posting on the blog? It is really up to you, but some possibilities include recommendations of recent articles or books that might be interesting to colleagues in the Department, discussions on particular themes of interest to you, upcoming conferences, requests for secondary literature on a given topic, favorite lunch truck/food cart debates, new recipes, etc. See you in the Logan Lounge!