I hear dead people: science,technology and a resonant universe

In recent years the simplistic categorization of Victorian practices and beliefs as either ‘occult’ or ‘scientific’ has been undercut by a series of revisionist analyses that point to an over-arching concern with influence and effect, a concern that was manifest across the sciences and humanities and beyond into popular culture. This paper sets out to further problematize such a distinction via an exploration of twentieth-century research into electronic voice phenomena (EVP), celebrated by its adherents as proof of a spiritual plane of existence beyond the readily observable or audible. In doing so, I focus on the work of one of the most active EVP researchers, Konstantin Raudive, as well as the web pages of the World Instrumental Transcommunication organization, drawing out the pivotal role of technology in the construction of this form of knowledge and some of its associated imaginative geographies. In and of itself, EVP research tells us much about the authoritative status of cause and effect explanatory frameworks, as well as the innocence accorded technological apparatus. An examination of how EVP has been received within academia, however, also reveals how, in our ‘post’-positivist academic environment, efforts are still being made to locate explanation within the human subject, as the charge is made that EVP researchers suffer from a logocentrism or are witness to Freud's doppelgänger. In response to these critiques, I pose the question: can the willingness of EVP researchers to abandon such human-centered certainties resonate with emergent ‘post-human’ ideas on the nature of explanation itself?     

党的三代领导人的科技战略思想

在科技落后的发展中国家追赶世界科技先进水平的征程中 ,制定正确的、适合本国国情的科技发展战略起着决定性的作用。新中国成立后的 50年里 ,中共三代领导人为此进行了艰辛的探索 ,在理论上成功地解决了我国科学技术发展的地位、立足点、动力、路径和支撑力量等一系列重大战略问题 ,逐步形成了有中国特色的科技战略思想 ,对中国科学技术事业的迅速崛起起到巨大的指导作用     

当代中国科普观的历史演进

科普观是一个时期人们关于科普内涵、功能、对象、任务等方面形成的基本态度和主流意识,受特定时期政治、经济、教育、科技文化诸因素的影响,对科普实践具有重要作用。本文以科普史料为基础,以科普四要素——科普语境、科普主体、科普内容和科普受众的特征分析为线索,对建国后我国科普观进行历史梳理。     

On the Case: Method in Public and Community Archaeology

This paper seeks to initiate a conversation about methodology in public and community archaeology through an examination of the use of case studies. Case studies enable the exploration of situations that are, by their nature, not easily reduced to statistical data. The challenge is that unless they are carefully structured, case studies may contribute little beyond anecdote to the field. Other disciplines that rely on case studies have addressed the methodological challenges aggressively. This paper explores these issues in four sections: First, the rationale for methodology in public archaeology is examined. Second, actual practice—through analysis of papers published in Public Archaeology and, to a limited degree, in the ‘grey literature’—is reviewed. Third, alternative case study methods, gleaned from diverse disciplines, are presented. Finally, the potential for method-based case study research is illustrated through an example of the use of one such method.     

Circulation of Coronavirus Images: Helping Social Distancing?

As soon as the SARS-Cov2 disease was recognized by experts to potentially cause a serious pandemic, a three dimensional diagrammatic image of the virus, colored in strong red, conquered public media globally. This study confronts this iconic virus image with a historic image analysis of 33,000 biomedical articles on coronaviruses published between 1968–2020 and interviews with some of their authors. Only a small fraction of scientific virus publications entail images of the complete virus. Red as an alarm color is not used at all by scientists who don't aim for a non-scientific public. Circulation in this case concerns the movement of iconic images from a scientific context into a general public. On the basis of hps-studies on scientific diagrams and especially on color use in scientific diagrams to convey specific messages in public, the paper discusses the role of the claim of public corona-virus diagram as “scientific.” It points at relevant differences between most frequent scientific corona-virus images and the diagrammatic image used in public. Both author- and readerships (in science and public) follow contrasting aims and values. Thus, the images meet non-expert readers for whom the images entail very different – and potentially unintended – meanings then to virus experts.     

Between Spectacle and Science: The Aurora in Central Europe, 1870s–1880s

Abstract

The article discusses the return and reception of two Austro-Hungarian arctic expeditions in 1874 and 1883, respectively. Both expeditions conducted extensive auroral research. The article focuses on the media discourse of the time: how the expeditions including their scientific aims and outcomes were perceived in the Viennese press and society. The reception given to each of the expeditions and the manner by which each was covered in the press differed greatly; accordingly, the aurora borealis, a quintessential polar phenomenon itself, was ascribed with strikingly dissimilar meanings in the media. Whereas in 1874 domestic interests were projected onto the Arctic, with the aurora symbolizing the monarchy's bright future, in 1883 media attention focused on local events such as the International Electrical Exhibition in Vienna; the Arctic no longer served as a potent symbol for Austro-Hungarian affairs. Analyses of various forms of media such as texts, poems, and illustrations show the cultural situatedness of scientific knowledge and its popularization. Representations and interpretations of the aurora can only be understood within the political, social, technological and cultural contexts of the time.     

Cultures of Incomprehension?: The Legacy of the Two Cultures Debate at the End of the Twentieth Century

This paper considers the impact of Snow's Two Culture's thesis on debates about the place of science and scientists in society in the latter part of the twentieth century. Debates concerned with the public understanding of science and the ‘science wars’, both of which relied to some extent on the dividing of society into ‘two cultures’, are contextualised within longer efforts by scientists to popularise definitions of science and society and their relationship with other epistemic communities. This paper argues that we should think about all these episodes as part of ongoing rhetorical boundary work, reflective of strains and stressors on science as an institution. The two cultures debate has provided one powerful rhetorical device, amongst many, for ongoing boundary work to establish or question science as the dominant form of knowledge in society and delineate who is allowed to speak for it, and wield its power.     

Between science and metaphysics: Fritz Lenz and racial anthropology in interwar Germany

This essay examines the philosophical and scientific approach of Fritz Lenz, Germany’s most eminent racial hygienist in the interwar years, toward the problem of race and soul. It focuses on Lenz’s attitude to the question of mental heredity, by examining his philosophical hypothesis concerning the mind-body problem and the antinomies and paralogisms it entails. Thus, it aims to go beyond the conventions and norms of “liberal science” and to trace Lenz’s biological reasoning by addressing the scientific and philosophical controversies of his time, highlighting the “crisis of science” and the emergence of holistic, vitalistic and biocentric language in 1920s Germany. The discussion illustrates the way in which Lenz sought to combine natural-scientific methods with metaphysical speculations, while rejecting scientific and materialistic monism in favor of an idealistic imperative of “faith in race”. Lenz’s racial anthropology serves here as a paradigmatic case study for re-examining the ideological and epistemological mechanisms, which enabled the apotheosis of race in interwar Germany and its becoming a supreme value.     

Water, technology, and the courtroom: negotiating reclamation policy in territorial New Mexico

Historical investigation of arid landscapes and communities in the American West has long focused on the pivotal influence of federal reclamation policy, typically characterizing its implementation as the application of scientific and technological methods to a variety of water resource management issues. This paper departs from traditional views of reclamation by highlighting the highly variable and contingent ways in which new science-based forms of water management were proposed and negotiated in specific local places with particular cultural, legal, and historical geographies. Drawing theoretically from literature on the ‘geography of science,’ the paper probes the ways in which authority for a scientific approach to water management was created, negotiated, and expressed in local and regional contexts in the Territory of New Mexico, where authoritative systems of practical resource use and administration had been in long use before the U.S. government initiated its federal water reclamation program in 1902. Specifically, the paper examines two disputes entered and argued in front of northern New Mexico’s Rio Arriba District Dourt between 1903 and 1905. By departing from the geographical and scalar perspectives typically applied to environmental histories of the West and its reclamation landscapes, this ‘microgeographical’ approach promises a fresh perspective that emphasizes the highly contingent ways in which science-based water policy was implemented in multiple and complex environments.     

Tracking the Coverage of Public Policy in Mass Media

The average citizen often does not experience government policy directly, but learns about it from the mass media. The nature of media coverage of public policy is thus of real importance, for both public opinion and policy itself. It nevertheless is the case that scholars of public policy and political communication have invested rather little time in developing methods to track public policy coverage in media content. The lack of attention is all the more striking in an era in which media coverage is readily available in digital form. This paper offers a proposal for tracking coverage of the actual direction of policy change in mass media. It begins with some methodological considerations, and then draws on an expository case—defense spending in the United States—to assess the effectiveness of our automated content‐analytic methods. Results speak to the quantity and quality in media coverage of policy issues, and the potential role of mass media—to both inform and mislead—in modern representative democracy.     

Animal Electricity at the End of the Eighteenth Century: The Many Facets of a Great Scientific Controversy

In the 1790s, Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta were the main protagonists of a lively debate on the role of electricity in animal organisms. Significant developments originated from this debate, leading to the foundation of two new disciplines, electrodynamics and electrophysiology, that were to play a crucial role in the scientific and technological progress of the last two centuries. The Galvani-Volta controversy has been repeatedly reconstructed, sometimes in an attempt to identify the merits and the errors of one or the other of the two protagonists, sometimes with the aim of demonstrating that the theories elaborated by the two Italian scholars were irreconcilable, reflecting completely different ways of looking at phenomena and conceiving of scientific research. In this article a different interpretation is offered, based on a discussion of the scientific issues that were central to Galvani's and Volta's research, and with reference to the context of science and society of the eighteenth century.     

Making Cultural Heritage Significant for the Public. The Role of Researchers in Encouraging Public Awareness and Local Pride

The municipality of Olavarría, Buenos Aires province, Argentina, has a rich, diverse, and ancient natural and cultural heritage, although this is not well known by the local community. For this reason, an itinerant exhibition was developed to promote public access to scientific information and community awareness concerning the importance of local heritage. This project was the starting point of an integral programme of public outreach and science education, whose main goal is to facilitate intellectual and physical access to academic knowledge by local communities. After seven years of development, several lessons have been learned, including the need to increase stakeholders’ participation and the exploration of new strategies of communication in order to engage different segments of the public.     

The Chinese developmental state during the Cold War: the making of the 1956 twelve-year science and technology plan

Abstract

In 1956, the government of the People’s Republic of China made a 12-year plan for scientific and technological developments (‘The Long-term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology for 1956–1967’), often credited as a visionary blueprint for its nuclear weapons programs and industrialization. Yet, this study suggests that the plan was not the logical manifestation of a unified national leadership, but rather the result of political contestations and compromises among the Communist party-state leaders, especially between Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and between the state and the scientific–technological elite. It further indicates that the making of Chinese science and technology policy was shaped by the cold war geopolitics, national developmental aspirations and transnational influences, especially from the Soviet Union and the USA.     

互联网的传播作用对旅游目的地演化的影响——基于婺源的个案研究

本文旨在探讨互联网这一信息传播媒介在旅游目的地演化中的作用机制。研究以婺源为案例地,经三方资料(田野调查、网络数据、样本访谈)互证后还原了婺源旅游业发展过程。研究发现,在婺源的旅游地生命周期演进中,互联网作为新兴媒介,沟通小圈子传播与大众传播,促进了旅游地从探查阶段向参与阶段演化;互联网的早期传播在提升目的地知名度的同时使游客到访量渐增,为政府介入旅游发展奠定了市场基础,推动了目的地快速发展;进入发展阶段后,互联网作为互动传播媒介的优势使政府宣传、名人效应、事件营销的传播被放大。研究突破了单纯将互联网作为营销工具看待的局限性观点,把互联网作为影响旅游目的地演化的因素纳入到目的地演化理论范畴,深化并补充了旅游地生命周期理论的相关内容。     

Literature’s place in the global public health arena: Graham Greene’s fictional translation of leprosy in A Burnt-Out Case

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the engagement of Graham Greene's novel A Burnt-Out Case with traditional discourses of leprosy (the biblical ‘leper’ as a sinner, missionary care, tropical medicine, Albert Schweitzer's hospital in Lambaréné, germ theory), and shows how it suggests an ethics of care which highlights the psychosocial aspects of disease and healing. The paper argues that the reception of the novel opened a discursive space for the re-negotiation of images of leprosy after empire, making visible the structures and agents of global public health communication and their diverging conceptions of explanatory authority, scientific accuracy and the relation of science and literature. The article incorporates archival sources from press reviews to draft versions of the novel and the author's correspondence with prominent leprosy experts. It draws on media and science communication studies, disability studies and on contributions to the sociology of knowledge by Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn and Bruno Latour.     

The reinvention of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 1992–2012

This article examines the most recent history of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, with particular emphasis on how this laboratory shifted its research program from accelerator-based particle physics towards astroparticle physics, cosmology and multi-disciplinary photon science. Photon science became the central experimental research program through a series of changes in the organisational, scientific, and infrastructural set-up and in its science policy context. The article shows that SLAC’s reinvention unfolded in a science policy context in which funding priorities drifted towards the materials sciences and the life sciences at the expense of nuclear and particle physics, which had dominated science budgets during the Cold War. SLAC took a lead position in this global development by partly dismantling and also redeploying scientific and technical capabilities from its particle physics program for these new fields, thus, providing novel experimental facilities for user communities to expand across academia and industry.     

The scientific commons in the marketplace: the industrialization of biomedical materials at the New England Enzyme Center, 1963–1980

This paper investigates the industrialization of biomedical materials at the New England Enzyme Center (NEEC) from its establishment as a federally supported biochemical resource center in 1964 through its demise and refashioning into several commercial biotech companies in the late 1970s. It sets this history within the long‐standing debate on the proper relation between science and American economic and political traditions. The NEEC sought to embody two aims that stood in tension: academic independence in knowledge production and the market‐driven interests of the biomedical industry. A clash of values ensued, but built on a particular notion of independence: scientists pragmatically accepted the primacy of the market in the age of the ‘federal research economy.’ The question became how to carve out a space for science and scientific values in the market – an intellectual position that some legal and economic scholars have referred to as a scientific commons. Even so, industry executives came to see the idea of a scientific commons and public knowledge as obstructive to industrial innovation. This paper argues that, as seen through the case of the NEEC, the ascendancy of market values and attitudes in the 1970s played a critical role in reconfiguring the science‐industry relationship and in ‘industrializing’ the life sciences. As illustration of this change, I look at a commercial firm – Genzyme – born out of NEEC’s dissolution.     

‘I don't think it was such an issue back then’: changing experiences of pregnancy across two generations of women in south-east England

Based upon in-depth interviews with recent mothers and their own mothers in London, England, this article uses a cross-generational perspective to examine the changing experiences/perceptions of pregnancy over the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Pregnancy is a biological process, but exists within social, economic, political and cultural realms and is both spatially and temporally located. In this article we argue that advances in gender equality, maternity benefits, technological innovation and mass media have meant that pregnancy is now increasingly experienced in the ‘public’ sphere, whereas, in earlier twentieth century Britain at least, it was often relegated to the realm of private or domestic life. However with these changes have come new types of surveillance in the form of scientific ‘advice’, medical technologies and media dissemination of cultural ‘norms’ regarding appropriate dress, lifestyle and behaviour during pregnancy. Based upon the findings of our research we examine these changes from two different perspectives: firstly a Foucauldian notion of surveillance in relation to ‘medical’ advice on diet/lifestyle during pregnancy, and secondly new expectations regarding body image and clothing in the context of the emergence of ‘pregnancy chic’ and the figure of the ‘celebrity mum’.     

从创新成果管窥文物科技保护发展趋势

中国文物科技保护工作起步于20世纪50年代,始终紧跟我国社会经济和科学技术的发展,以应对文物保护及其保存和开放展示环境面临着的诸多挑战为导向,聚焦基础研究、保护技术与装备研发、保护制度与规范标准研究、保护技术平台建设等展开多项科技攻关,取得了一系列成果。本文着重从文物保护科学和技术创新成果进行梳理,阐述了我国文物科技工作的发展趋势。结果表明,我国的文物保护科学研究从闭门研究、各自为战到资源开放、互相合作、凝练共性、共克难关;从随意性到标准化,建立共同话语体系;以问题为导向,支撑作用日益显著;由抢救性保护向抢救性保护与预防性保护并重转变,基本实现了“十三五”规划提出的在理论、技术、装备、标准建设等方面取得系统突破的目标。     

Waterfalls,science and aesthetics

Waterfalls and rapids are a subject of study by scientists and scholars from a variety of academic and professional backgrounds. Unlike cave research, known as speleology, which also involves many different disciplines, the study of waterfalls is not generally regarded as a distinct branch of knowledge. Long neglected as subjects of research, waterfalls have received considerable attention since the 1980s. This paper traces the study of waterfalls from the late eighteenth century, a period when both a scientific and an aesthetic interest in landscape developed in Europe, to the present. The work of geographers, geologists and others who studied landforms and landscapes is examined, with particular attention to those who expressed a special interest in waterfalls, notably Alexander von Humboldt. The study argues that the scientific and aesthetic approaches to landscape research are not incompatible and supports the view that both are necessary for a full understanding and appreciation of the environment in which we live.