The STS Compages
bcohen | April 29, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
Richard Powers, in his debut novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, constructs a story about the identity of the three farmers in August Sander's 1914 photograph of that name. The novel takes on not just the three farmers, but three storylines too. The many characters in his three-thread narrative each, in some way, contribute to the larger story about technology, photography, philosophy, and knowledge. I've touched on as much in earlier parts to this…
bcohen | April 4, 2008Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt 3 | Pt 4- - -
Part 4 with Kelly Joyce, author of Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here.
WF: Is your story of MRI one that is common to medical technologies? Common to the commodification (in an economic sense) or routinization (in the sense of technical practice) of machines in daily medical practice? Common to a story about the consequences of health care practice in the 21st century? Anything?
KJ: The integration of MRI into medical practice is a story that shares issues of…
bcohen | March 24, 2008"We Americans increased our travel -- just for shopping -- by over 90 billion miles from 1990 to 2001. That's billion with a 'B.' It's safe to say that most of those new miles were not spent seeking out local food." A. Flaccavento
So it is that the localism movement is in full flush. No news flash there. Along with such popular movements come determined counter-arguments. With local food, one of those counter claims deals with Food Miles (as discussed before here and here and here). Anthony Flaccavento, director of Appalachian Sustainable Development, wrote an op-ed in the Washington…
bcohen | March 10, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
Morris believes that shadows are the key. Yes, I'm back onto the actual path of Morris's investigation, where he's been pursuing the question 'which of Fenton's Crimean pictures came first?' and I've been pursuing his pursuit. He thinks that by measuring the angle of shadows from the cannonballs he can determine what time of day each picture was taken and, thus, get them in the correct order. A shadow is the back third of a three-part connection: the light…
bcohen | February 26, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
...continuing from Sidebar 2a (you might read that first before continuing on below)
All of the above (Sidebar 2a) interested me in its own right but truly startled me when set beside a simultaneous set of little essays on-line about Stalin and the bomb. Lawrence Weschler discusses a tale Solzhenitsyn told about applauding for Stalin. At a Communist Party meeting, Solzhenitsyn wrote--and here I abbreviate the longer telling of the story--that everyone stood…
bcohen | February 25, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
"Synchroneity. All times at one. My hobby."*
This one's about bombs and mercury and milk and Communists and theater and world history. That's all.
Daston and Galison's Objectivity (See Preface, Pt. 1 and Pt. 2) begins with a quick prologue setting up the basic ideas of the book. That prologue tells of the physicist Arthur Worthington, who in the 1870s had first hand drawn the results of his experiments in fluid dynamics--"untangling the complex process…
bcohen | February 6, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
As an understatement, I can say this: I've been overwhelmed of late. All of these questions Morris raises about Fenton and the cannonballs of Sebastopol and I'm not even halfway through discussing them. And to think that my interest in Morris really got going when it coincided with the discussion brought up by Daston and Galison in their Objectivity. In the meantime, and as briefly alluded to in Part 3, I picked up Richard Powers's first novel again, Three…
bcohen | January 22, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
As I was saying, I love that Morris gets peeved at the expert's claims for certainty. It reminded me immediately of the grad student seminar experience--and any humanities or social science grad student has certainly had it, if not all graduate students--where the one student defends his philosophical premise by stating that it is "obvious." Says Morris, in words I wish I'd pulled together in Philosophy of Science 6504:
Nothing is so obvious that it's…
bcohen | January 21, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
Here's a supposition, as I continue this series of posts on seeing and knowing: those Morris essays about Fenton's Crimean War photographs at a road outside Sebastopol are a precis for studies of science and technology in society (STS). Inside his essays is a sort of mini-history of the field of that name. A particular and limited story, to be sure, but nonetheless it goes somewhere by following the ever deeper demands of developing context. I'll start in…
bcohen | January 14, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
I wrote earlier (here, to be precise) that there are numerous ways a picture can manipulate its viewers, but most break down into two: a modification of an image after it's taken or staging an image before it's taken. The first way a picture can manipulate its viewers--modifying an image after it's taken--is mostly seen as downright deception and corruption. Someone takes a picture of Fabio and Photoshops George Bush's head on it. It is easy to dismiss and…
bcohen | January 10, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
This post was written by new guest blogger Jason Delborne.*
George Cruikshank (1836), A London Audience, from Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The notion of the "public" often surfaces when we think about science. What does the public understand about science? How can we improve the scientific literacy of the public? Is there such a thing as public-interest science? How should the public hold science and scientists accountable? How do research findings affect…
bcohen | January 8, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
"Pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words. But a picture unaccompanied by words may not mean anything at all. Do pictures provide evidence? And if so, evidence of what? And, of course, the underlying question: do they tell the truth?" -- E. Morris
There are numerous ways a picture can manipulate its viewers, but most break down into two: a modification of an image after it's taken or staging an image before it's taken. The documentary maker Errol…
bcohen | January 4, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
The title above is a quote from the book, Objectivity, subject of the prior two posts. Below the fold is an extended quote following that line. It circles back to a common topic at the blogs and at this one in particular, at the bottom.
(How do I know what/where/why my head is?)
All epistemology begins in fear - fear that the world is too labyrinthine to be threaded by reason; fear that the senses are too feeble and the intellect too frail; fear that memory…
bcohen | January 3, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
The last post (Scientific Objectivity has a History) was about an article from 1992 called "The Image of Objectivity," by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison.
Daston and Galison, 15 years later, have now written a book-length treatment of the topic, Objectivity (MIT Press, 2007). It argues that "To pursue objectivity--or truth-to-nature or trained judgment--is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover…
bcohen | January 3, 2008Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
Title page of William Cheselden's (1733) Osteographia; or, the Anatomy of the Bones, showing an artist drawing a half skeleton through camera obscura.
Students end up having favorite readings from their schooling. For graduate students, these are sometimes pivotal works in their own scholarship, influencing later doctoral writing and research and steering patterns of thinking one way or another. Other times, they're just a good and memorable read, bringing up…
bcohen | December 19, 2007I had the fortune to be a bit experimental in the classroom this semester. Curricular innovation, they call it. More precisely, in one of my courses (called "STS 200: Technology, Nature, and Sustainable Communities"), the students wrote an entire book. These are engineering students. All engineers. They wrote a book. A book about relationships between technology and nature as exemplified in a local UVA sustainable housing project called ecoMOD. A full, cohesive, compelling, well-argued, well-researched book. We were glad to see a nice write-up of the project linked from the university…
bcohen | November 30, 2007Continuing with cartoon week here at The World's Fair, we offer this one from Herb Block, circa 1977:
I'll leave this without undue editorializing, instead wondering if readers will offer their own take on this thirty-year old view of research agenda-setting, policy making, and government of scientific medical research.