January 2007

This year’s ‘bonus’ theme issue of The Lancet (vol. 368, supplement 1, December 2006) has several articles about medicine, art and creativity; it can be read online in this smart browsable version until early February 2007.

The Science Communication Group at Imperial College, London invites to a conference on Science & the Public, May 19, 2007.

Science studies research tends to focus on “the lab”, being chiefly concerned with the internal workings of the scientific community. This conference aims to bring together the strands of academia that consider science as it intersects with non-scientific cultures. The conference title’s dichotomy between “science” and “the public” consciously references the approach often taken by the scientific community. We are aware of the variety of problems of referring to the “the public”; research problematising the term may form part of the conference programme. Other topics covered may include: Read More

The Office of Exhibitions and Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences and the University of Maryland are inviting to a virtual (sic!) meeting on “Visual Culture and Bioscience”, March 5-13, 2007.

This international event will create a virtual meeting space for experts from many disciplines to discuss the intersections between visual culture and the biosciences. Artists, scientists, historians, ethicists, curators, sociologists, and writers will present a variety of perspectives on topics of visual representation in art and science and its implications on culture and society. Suzanne Anker, visual artist and theorist, will facilitate this online discussion. Anker teaches art history and theory at the School of Visual Arts in New York where she is chair and editor of ArtLab23. She is also the host of BioBlurb on WPS1 Art Radio.

They don’t say how the meeting is going to take place — I’m quite curious to see how they will solve the technical problems. [Added 10 January]: The symposium consists of two parts: First, there will be a listserv where invited panelists are discussing issues such as artists in the lab, imaging in art and science, and the social dimensions of the science-art connection. Visitors are invited to view the discussion but only panelists are permitted to post comments(link will be active after March 4, 2007). The second part of the symposium will consist of a public blog. Visitors can post their responses to the discussion here (link will be active after March 4, 2007).

The list of panelists is impressive:

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I promised to come back to Michael Crichton’s Next.

I didn’t expect much — but was nevertheless sort of positively surprised. Not because of Crichton’s writing skills. I’ve always been ambiguous about his books (The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Prey, etc.) because their literary value is, in my humble mind, not overwhelming. His characters only seem to have one emotion (in Next they invariably “frown” when they are supposed to express dislike of something).

Crichton reminds me of detective novelist Mickey Spillane who famously considered himself a “writer,” not an “author” (meaning that authors get prizes, while writers sell). Seven of Spillane’s titles are indeed among the ten best selling US books in the 20th century. Likewise Crichton will never get the Booker Prize or the Nobel Prize in literature — but the first print-run of Next is allegedly over one million copies.

And like Spillane, Crichton is a very efficient writer. The flap promises a blend of “fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new … genetic world” which is “fast, furious, and out of control. Well, Next is furious too — it’s a short-sentenced, dialogue-driven, fast-paced page-turner (it kept me awake until 2.30am) inhabited by dozens of rather unsympathetic, characters and interspersed with a few soft porn scenes.

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MuseumBlogs.org is a directory of (at present 98) museum and museum-related blogs. The majority of the posts are from the RSS feeds of the blogs listed in the directory (we don’t yet, but Benny will soon help us install the function). The site was developed by Ideum, a small design company that develops interactive exhibits and websites for museums:

“It’s our hope that MuseumBlogs.org will help increase the community’s awareness and authority. Policies MuseumBlogs.org is run as a public service and encourages community participation. The site does not accept commercial advertising of any kind”.

Believe it or not — but this humble blog has been nominated for the 2006 Medical Weblog Award, in three categories: Best Medical Blog, Best Literary Medical Blog, and Best Medical Technologies Blog. Vote now, here!

Thinking of our anthology-in-progress (Biomedicine on Display), I’ve pondered possible ways of encouraging collaborative writing projects — and was inspired the other day by Laura Cohen’s post “Why Can’t a Wiki Be More Like a Blog?” on Library 2.0: An Academic’s Perspective. Wikis are great for collective editing, but discourages people who “just” want to add comments. Blogs on the other hand don’t have the collective editing feature. Why not create a mix, a sort of Wikiblog? An example of a half-way solution that Laura Cohen mentions is the annotated edition of The Iraq Study Group Report which shows a very nice comment system where you can open windows and comment on each paragraph in the document. Says Laura: “Wikis and blogs could benefit from incorporating each others’ features. This could move us toward a truly full-featured integrated publishing platform in which the best of both systems are available”.