News from the Profession

Vol. 41, No. 2, April 2012
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Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, Opportunities for 2013–2014

The Institute for Advanced Study is an independent private institution founded in 1930 to create a community of scholars focused on intellectual inquiry, free from teaching and other university obligations. Scholars from around the world come to the Institute to pursue their own research. Candidates of any nationality may apply for a single term or a full academic year. Scholars may apply for a stipend, but those with sabbatical funding, other grants, retirement funding, or other means are also invited to apply for a non-stipendiary membership. Some short-term visitorships (for less than a full term, and without stipend) are also available on an ad-hoc basis. Open to all fields of historical research, the School of Historical Studies' principal interests are the history of western, near eastern and Asian civilizations, with particular emphasis upon Greek and Roman civilization, the history of Europe (medieval, early modern, and modern), the Islamic world, East Asian studies, the history of art, the history of science, philosophy, modern international relations, and music studies. Residence in Princeton during term time is required. The only other obligation of Members is to pursue their own research. The Ph.D. (or equivalent) and substantial publications are required. Information and application forms may be found on the School's web site, www.hs.ias.edu, or contact the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein Dr., Princeton, N.J. 08540 (E-mail address: mzelazny@ias.edu). Deadline: 1 November 2012.

Recent History of Science Dissertation Abstracts Available

The latest list of recent doctoral dissertations pertaining to the history of science world-wide harvested from the issues of Dissertation Abstracts have been downloaded to the HSLS homepage and can be viewed at: http://www.hsls.pitt.edu/histmed/dissertations.

Science Studies on Dissertation Reviews

The following reviews have been posted in January and February on "Science Studies Dissertation Reviews," at dissertationreviews.org:

Nick Whitfield A Genealogy of the Gift: Blood Donation in London, 1921–1946, reviewed by Robin Scheffler.
Erin Sullivan, Secret Contagions: Sadness and the Self in Early Modern England, reviewed by Kristine Steenbergh.
Melinda Baldwin, Nature and the Making of a Scientific Community,1869–1939, reviewed by Jenna Tonn.
Margaret Olszewski, Designer Nature: The Papier-mâché Botanical Teaching Models of Dr Auzoux in Nineteenth-Century France, Great Britain and America, reviewed by Anna Maerker.
Lydia Barnett, The Living Rock: Natural, Human, and Sacred Histories of the Earth, 1680–1740, reviewed by Dániel Margócsy.
Alistair Marcus Kwan, Architectures of Astronomical Observation: From Sternwarte Kassel (ca. 1560) to the Radcliffe Observatory (1772), reviewed by Rebekah Higgitt.
Bonnie Evans, Mental Defectives, Childhood Psychotics and the Origins of Autism Research at the Maudsley Hospital, 1913-1983, reviewed by Stephan T. Casper.

To contribute a review, or to have your dissertation reviewed, please email dissertationreviews@gmail.com.

International History and Philosophy of Science Teaching Group Newsletter Online

The IHPST newsletter is now available on their website at http://ihpst.net/newsletters/jan2012.pdf.

Psychology's Feminist Voices: An Oral History and Online Archive Project

The Psychology's Feminist Voices Oral History Project was launched in 2004 by Alexandra Rutherford of York University. It is an initiative to document and preserve the voices and stories of feminist psychologists for the historical record and for scholarship, teaching, and advocacy in the social sciences. To date, over 100 interviews with self-identified feminist psychologists have been conducted. In 2010, the Psychology's Feminist Voices multimedia internet archive was launched: www.feministvoices.com. The site features profiles of participants in the oral history project, full transcripts and video excerpts from their interviews, a 40-minute original documentary about the history of feminist psychology in the United States, as well as profiles of women in the history of psychology, timelines, and contemporary and historical resources for students and others interested in women and feminism in psychology.

The project has received funding and support from multiple sources and is carried out by a dedicated team of research assistants, including many graduate students in the History and Theory of Psychology Graduate Program at York University. For more information, contact Alexandra Rutherford: alexr@yorku.ca.

Register & Read (Coming soon!)

Register & Read Beta is a new, experimental program to offer free, read-online access to individual scholars and researchers who register for a MyJSTOR account. Register & Read follows the release of the Early Journal Content (http://about.jstor.org/participate-jstor/individuals/early-journal-content) as the next step in our efforts to find sustainable ways to extend access to JSTOR, specifically to those not affiliated with participating institutions.

How will it work?

Find an article that's part of Register & Read, click on a "Get Access" option.
Register for a free MyJSTOR account, or log into your account if you already have one.
Add the content to your shelf to read the full-text online. After 14 days, you may remove it and add new items to your shelf.
PDF versions of some articles will also be available for purchase and download. If you purchase articles from your shelf, the PDF versions may be stored and accessed in your MyJSTOR account at any time.

At launch, Register & Read will include approximately 70 journals from more than 30 publishers, a subset of the content in JSTOR. This includes content from the first volume and issue published for these journals through a recent year (generally 3-5 years ago). We plan to add more titles at a later date.

Register & Read is a beta program, and we expect to adjust aspects of the program as needed. This may include both functionality and the available content.
If you would like to be notified of the launch of Register & Read, you may follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

Web Links

Joseph H. Hazen Lecture in the History of Science

Join us for the 2012 Joseph H. Hazen lecture in the history of science, Wednesday, May 16, at 6 p.m. at The New York Academy of Sciences, 7 World Trade Center, followed by a reception with guests. Anne Harrington (Harvard University) will be speaking on "Bodies Behaving Badly: Insights from the History of Mind-Body Medicine and Why They Matter."

There is a general assumption in the academy that, while human cultures vary in different times and places, the human body always works the same, in all times and places. This talk draws on material from the history of mind-body medicine to challenge this assumption. Especially in situations of illness, there is evidence that human bodily experience is shaped by culture and, in this sense, has a history that needs to be told, alongside the histories of changing medical and folk theories. Together, we will explore some of the evidence, how it has been understood, and why it matters for work in both the humanities and the medical sciences.

The biennial Hazen Lecture is made possible by a gift from Cynthia Hazen Polsky, in memory of her father, Joseph Hazen, a prominent patron of HSS, and NYAS. The lecturer is chosen by the Executive Committee of the HSS. The talk is also jointly sponsored by the History and Philosophy of Science Section at the Academy, the Metropolitan New York Section of the History of Science Society, New York University, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Columbia University, Colloquium of Science, Technology, Medicine and Society and University Seminar in the History and Philosophy of Science, City University of New York Ph.D. Program in History, and History of Science Lecture Series.

New Rootenberg Catalogue Available

B & L Rootenberg Rare Books is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of our new catalogue of rare books and manuscripts in the history of science and medicine. If you are interested in receiving a copy of the printed catalogue, please send your name, address, and collecting interests to:

B & L Rootenberg Rare Books
P.O. Box 5049
Sherman Oaks, CA 91403

HSTM Database Is Moving

On 1 March 2012 OCLC announced the transfer to EBSCO Publishing of the rights to publisher-owned databases that are currently available through the OCLC FirstSearch reference service. This transfer includes the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (HSTM) database to which the HSS Bibliographer contributes. This transfer was not unexpected. OCLC asked HSS to sign a non-disclosure agreement while the negotiations were underway. We had lengthy conversations with both OCLC and EBSCO. Our primary concerns included ongoing smooth access to the database by HSS members and no loss in search functions for the database. We were assured on both counts. We have asked the University of Chicago Press, which controls members' access to the HSTM database through their website, to start working with EBSCO on the transition.

While discussing the transition, we learned the good news that SHOT is once again contributing to the database, and entries continue to be posted by the Wellcome Institute and by the Museum of the History of Science in Florence, thus providing a rich collection of bibliographic materials for scholars. We are particularly gratified that all HSS members have access to these bibliographies.

New York Exhibit Showcases Jews in the History of Science

A new exhibit at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York City called "Trail of the Magic Bullet: The Jewish Encounter with Modern Medicine, 1860-1960" addresses the emergence of scientific medicine and how it radically shaped the way that Jews lived, and how the development presented new opportunities, new challenges, and new ways for them to engage with modern society. The exhibit will be open until 12 August 2012.

Of Books and Google Books

Anita Guerrini, Horning Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History, Oregon State University

In the summer of 1979, I helped to proofread Never at Rest, the biography of Isaac Newton by my graduate advisor Sam Westfall. Being the meticulous scholar he was (a trait I hope he conveyed to me), he also had me check all of his footnotes. I marveled at the number of archives and libraries he had visited in his quest to see everything Newton wrote; only an obscure library in Geneva had denied him access, and in his preface he "wished them the joy of their possession." I can hear Sam's inimitable voice in those words, not that I ever dared to call him Sam until I was safely a Ph.D. That same summer I worked at the Lilly Library at Indiana as a receptionist, a job I held all through graduate school. I learned most of what I know about rare books from Josiah Quincy Bennett, the Lilly's legendary rare book cataloguer.

In my own research over the past thirty years I've visited my share of libraries and archives. But increasingly over the past few years, I've also gone to Gallica or Google Books or EEBO or ECCO and downloaded hundreds of PDFs onto my laptop. Were I still working on Newtonian matters, I could go to Rob Iliffe's or Bill Newman's excellent websites and read Newton's manuscripts online. I love Tim Hitchcock's Old Bailey website. I can read the minutes of the Paris Academy of Sciences in my study in Corvallis, Oregon with my cat in my lap and no jet lag. I can find that stray page number within a few minutes. In one of her books, Natalie Davis thanked a library's staff for staying open late on a Saturday night so she could squeeze out that last bit of research, and as a parent whose research has often taken place in manic slots of a few days, I find it unimaginably luxurious to have access to so much that was previously locked up far away.

And yet there is something lost in depending on digital copies of my primary sources, and I don't just mean access to restaurants in Paris. I've talked elsewhere about what I see as the limits of "culturomics," the Google n-gram tool. Culturomics sees books as simply units of text, bricks in an edifice of words. My time at the Lilly made me very conscious of the book as an object and an artifact. Recently Gallica digitized the Paris Academy's 1671 Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux. I have been reading this book for the past decade, in at least four different libraries. I am thrilled to have it so easily accessible. But on the screen, the physical presence of "le grand livre" (as the librarians called it who hauled it out for me in Salle Y at the Bibliothèque nationale) is completely lost. It's an elephant folio, over two feet high, almost too big to fit in a book cradle. Most of the copies that I have seen have been bound in red morocco with gold tooling at the corners and Louis XIV's fleur-de-lis in the center of the cover. At the British Library in the summer of 2010 I looked at five copies, all different, including Hans Sloane's own copy, which was bound in blue cloth. I propped them up side by side on giant book rests, monopolizing two desks in the crowded rare books reading room.

Of course all books don't have such presence, but recent studies of reading and note taking should remind us that reading and writing in the pre-digital age were deliberate acts that involved a number of physical objects, sometimes now referred to as "paper technologies": loose sheets, notebooks, ink, pens, books, presses, engravers, later perhaps typewriters and carbon paper. The differences between a broadside and a textbook are not simply in the number of pages but in the quality of the paper, the typeface, the size, even the shape, none of which is conveyed very well by a digital copy. Likewise a manuscript is not only the words on the page but the page itself.

My second concern, one that I find ample evidence to confirm in my students, is that if a book is not digitized it ceases to exist. I fear the increasing loss of the physical book to the electronic copy as library budgets continue to contract; we already can see the wholesale unloading of periodical collections. Wide scale digitization would, it seems, make a project like Never at Rest much easier to do. But I wonder if in fact the opposite might be true, and that by trusting in the digital we increasingly overlook that other world of print and paper, diminishing our range of vision rather than expanding it.

Perhaps my concerns are unfounded, and I'm not going to delete all those PDFs from my laptop. But I still go to libraries and archives as often as I can.

Robert Smith Delivers the 50th Sarton Lecture

The Sarton Lecturer is chosen by the Executive Committee of the HSS. The Lecture, which is supported by the HSS and the AAAS, provides a rare opportunity for a historian of science to speak to an audience largely comprised of scientists. Since the AAAS conference is the world's largest general scientific meeting, the lecture gives the HSS an opportunity to reach out to professionals in the sciences and engineering from around the world.

Robert Smith, Professor of History at the University of Alberta, gave the George Sarton Memorial Lecture in the History and Philosophy of Science at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting this past February in Vancouver, British Columbia. Speaking to a crowd of over 100 scientists, historians, media professionals, and others, Professor Smith explored the concept of large-scale science in his presentation "Making Science Big: From Little Science to Megaprojects."

Robert Smith (left) and Jane Maienschein, Chair of Section L of AAAS

Robert Smith (left) and Jane Maienschein, Chair of Section L of AAAS

The talk began with a picture of Vannevar Bush in 1942, pipe clenched in his teeth, holding a large test tube while seated at a lab bench, a personal metaphor for the scientist as lone researcher. Professor Smith then proceeded to outline the received view of big science, a type of science that many trace back to World War II. Hans Bethe was reportedly the first scientist to publicly use the term "big science" in 1958, and Smith described Bethe's lament that for many scientists big science had closed the door on the golden years of science, those periods in which science came from the ivory towers of pure research. This sentiment of loss resonated with many others, from Alvin Weinberg, who declared in Science in 1961 that big science marked a "pathological state," to Dwight Eisenhower, who in the same year spoke of the solitary inventor, tinkering in his lab, now being overshadowed by task forces of scientists in labs.

Smith then swerved from the received view. After a passing reference to the large-scale projects of Chinese and Islamic astronomers, he described Tycho's efforts at Uraniborg, with his 30 assistants, wind mill, paper mill, and expensive equipment. He talked about Joseph Banks exploring the world on the Endeavour with his team of aides and Darwin's own voyage and subsequent network of contributors from around the world. But the biggest science of the 19th century was the so-called Magnetic Crusade, followed later by the cooperative efforts engendered by World War I, particularly the efforts involved in chemical warfare.

And it was this "cooperative spirit," which is so necessary to big science, that was cemented in the physical sciences in World War II. The war forced many scientists to work on large-scale enterprises and one of the byproducts of these cooperative ventures was that some scientists learned the art of coalition building. A good example of coalition building can be found in the Hubble Space Telescope, a scientific instrument that seemed doomed shortly after launch but was saved, in Smith's view, by political and managerial feats every bit as impressive as the Hubble's technical advances. Hubble's coalition—the US Congress, the White House, NASA, the European Space Agency, the US Department of Defense, the media, members of the public and, of course, scientists and engineers—kept the Hubble alive (cost to date: $20 billion and counting). In contrast, other big-science enterprises, such as the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC), failed because they lacked the political and technical patronage essential for driving these megaprojects forward. Smith advised scientists to learn the lessons from the Hubble and the SSC because if they don't, Steven Weinberg's prediction that we will soon see an end to the search for the laws of nature may become more than a warning from Cassandra.

MSNBC's Jeremy Hsu interviewed Professor Smith at the AAAS meeting in Vancouver, BC. The story, "New space telescope needs 'big science' support to succeed," can be read at msnbc.com.

The Isis Bibliography Breaks Another Record

- Stephen P. Weldon, HSS Associate Editor

This winter I completed my tenth volume of the Isis Bibliography. At 360 pages, this year's volume is physically the largest one I have produced. It was another record-breaking year both in terms of size and quality.

Although the bibliography has slightly fewer individually classified items than last year, there was more text on average in each one. The main reason for this is that many more of the edited books included a listing of at least some of the separately authored chapters. While I've always added contents lists, this year my assistants were able to find and add more of them than in the past. Those individual chapters—two thousand in all—took up a lot of space, and this lengthened the author index as well.

We picked up works in more obscure places this year. As you may remember, a year ago last December, I issued a call to all members for contributions. That call yielded about three-hundred emails. Each of those emails contained at least one or two items, and prolific authors had many more than that. Some of these citations would have been found through our standard research methods—scanning journals, looking at publisher catalogs and websites, entering book reviews—but we would not have discovered many of them unless someone directed us to the right place.

Little did I imagine how much work it would take to process the submissions. We received so much material from those three-hundred contributors that we were unable to enter it all before the end of the year, which means that we are still working on the last part of it as I write. One reason this has taken so long is that we couldn't just drop our regular practice of scanning new journals, nor could we allow recently published books to pile up. We had to fit the emails into an already busy schedule.

But the quantity of contributed items was not the main reason it has taken us so long. We discovered as we started working that one chapter out of an edited book would frequently lead us to many other relevant chapters. Also, we were alerted to journals we hadn't scanned before, and many times, a search of these resources recovered even more articles for the CB. What we learned is that where one historian of science goes, others follow.

Tracking my colleagues through the jungle of scholarship, I frequently find myself in unexpected places. It's not too surprising to be scanning copies of American Mathematical Monthly or The Coleopterists Bulletin—after all, much history of science still does cater to the interests of scientists themselves. In addition, for people who call themselves historians, journals like Biography and History in Africa don't raise many eyebrows. But anyone from outside of our discipline would no doubt be perplexed that we publish in the Journal of Folklore Research or White House Studies. There is even a journal called PsycCritiques which has printed material relevant to our field.

Following leads into uncharted waters is what makes this job so interesting. Although my assistants and I can't spend much time on any one item, we must learn enough about it to know whether it fits in Isis at all, and if it does, where it needs to go. That is where the excitement and challenge lies. In my weekly staff meetings, we talk about these issues: what makes a good entry? How do you know when a topic is too far afield? How do you even categorize and index some of these things? A lot of intellectual work goes into trying to understand what this field of ours is all about.

Beyond the production of the bibliography, I've been involved in several other projects. First of all, everyone who uses the online database HSTM will be anxious to know about the recent acquisition of that database by EBSCO. (You'll find more information about that transfer in a separate article in this issue of the Newsletter.) The contracts have just been signed, so we are at the very early stages. Given the discussions I've had so far, I am optimistic that the move will be a good one and offer new opportunities. I'm hopeful that we might see an increase in institutional subscriptions globally. Moreover, EBSCO may be able to provide new functionality for the database. It is too early to give any concrete details about what to expect, but I will keep all of you updated as I work with EBSCO to ensure that they meet our needs.

Promoting bibliographical efforts by others is part of my mission as Isis bibliographer. Over the last year, I have begun working with my colleague Suzanne Moon, the current editor of Technology and Culture. She and I have been able to restart the SHOT bibliography with help from my software. Because SHOT currently has no bibliographer of their own, their program is driven by a call to membership similar to the one I made a year ago. Moon now has an assistant processing those volunteer contributions for history of technology, and these contributions will soon appear in the HSTM database.

Along similar lines, I have continued to work with an international project called the World History of Science Online (WHSO) in an effort to create an Isis-type index for online resources. WHSO is hosted by the University of Melbourne's e-Scholarship Research Centre in Australia, and it allows users to search by a variety of indexed terms. Last summer, two University of Oklahoma graduate students, Margaret Gaida and Amy Rodgers, collected, described, and indexed about three hundred scholarly websites, and these are now accessible at the WHSO site. The records include detailed information about each website, including languages supported, hosting institutions, and types of resources (full-text archive, bibliography, image gallery, encyclopedia, etc.). WHSO will continue to grow yearly. By the end of this coming summer you can expect to find much more there, and if you would like to suggest resources not yet added, please feel free to contact me directly.

In a year in which the ninety-nine percent are demanding to be heard, HSS should be proud that our bibliography is accessible to more people than ever before. The digital revolution has opened up access to our data. PDFs of individual bibliographies that are over one year old can be retrieved from the History of Science Society's website for no charge, and the open-access WorldCat.org database contains much Isis data as well. (You can find links to these resources at www.hssonline.org.)

In closing, let me explain why I've written most of this article in the first person plural. Much of the credit for this year's achievement goes to my two graduate assistants, John Stewart and Jared Buss. They deserve special commendation for their hard and careful work. But their achievement is more significant than the numbers alone tell. What is truly impressive to me is that they managed to contribute to this record-breaking volume the same year that each of them became a new father! Despite its large size, the 2011 Isis Current Bibliography must properly be called the baby issue. Welcome Madeline and Evie!

History of Science Society