November 2007

In an earlier post I discussed the Silicon Valley web-based genetic information up-start company 23andMe as an example of converging technologies.

23andMe and its public-engagement-with-genetics based business idea is the subject of a long and interesting feature article by Thomas Goetz in today’s Wired Magazine. 23andMe is now offering customers to scan their DNA for just $999 (by SNP genotyping from individual saliva samples with the help of the Illumina HumanHap550+ BeadChip).

The Wired-article raises a plethora of issues concerning the formation of ‘biocitizenship‘, or, to use a neologism, rather bio-consumership — that is, the convergence between bioinformatics, business, and the public engagement with science.

Goetz relates a meeting in September when Avey and Wojcicki invited their board of scientific advisers to review the website before it was launched. Much of the discussion circled around the question of how much they would have to teach their customers about genetics to enable them to understand the business offering. They ended with a compromise: “letting the genetics hobbyist geek out on the details while giving the novice a minimum of information”.

As Goetz writes, a web-based, customer-oriented bioinformatics company is not like Flickr or Facebook:

There’s nothing intuitive about navigating your genome; it requires not just a new vocabulary but also a new conception of personhood […] There’s a massive amount of information to comprehend and fears to allay before customers will feel comfortable with the day-to-day utility of the site.

23andMe’s solution to the public-engagement-with-genetics problem is to offer a rather rich menu of FAQs together with some basic animated tutorials (e.g., here and here) that explain the basic principles of genetics.

It will be fascinating to follow 23andMe.  I guess several other companies will soon follow along the same bio-consumership road.

(The Wired-article also includes a videochat with 23andMe co-founders Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki who explain “how they’re helping people make sense of their genetic information”, but Goetz’s text is much more informative.)

Twice a year the Danish museum community comes together for a two-day meeting at the Fuglsø Conference Center, strategically placed between Copenhagen and Aarhus. The 2007 autumn meeting last Wednesday through Friday gathered 500+ participants, and quite a few of them attended the Thursday morning session on “Science, medicine and technology as culture”, organised by Karin Tybjerg (formerly HPS, Cambridge, now Head of the Dept of Astronomy at Kroppedal Museum outside Copenhagen).

I had expected an audience of twenty or so, but to my surprise there were at least 75 people in the room

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Sometimes I wish I were still a graduate student, because all interesting conferences these days seem to be aimed at junior scholars (maybe it’s time to shift career again?). For example this one: ‘The Power of Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Morality’, a graduate student symposium at Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Saturday 5 April, 2008.

The meeting feeds into a revival of ‘beauty’ (even ‘universal beauty’?) in the arts and humanities (or maybe ‘beauty’ never really disappeared?). I don’t know if this revival should be interpreted as a sign of post-postmodernism, or ‘rightism’, or even ‘neo-fascism’ (as my good colleague Roger Cooter might say), or if it is maybe just an effect of the constant need for academic renewal? Whatever the case, however, the comeback of ‘beauty’ is interesting, I think, because it expands the repertoire of interpretative and communicative strategies in the museum world.

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Joanna Marchant reminds us (on Digital Heritage) that many museums are busy creating on-line catalogues and other digital access points, but that this is a slow process and that few institutions are utilising the full potential of digitalisation. However, she says, a current research project by Suzanne Keene (formerly Head of Collections at Science Museum, now at UCL), 

hints that attention should be turned towards mobilising the current fad of user generated content pages to the cause. If museums are to fully utilise digital technologies to widen access then they should seriously consider how they can tap into sites such as Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia and interactive gaming.

I’m all in favor of using Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia etc. for museum purposes. But utilising these and similar new media for making existing collections accessible to a larger audience doesn’t necessarily mean that the content becomes ‘user-generated’. User-generativity would involve a much more radical redefinition of the sacred status of collections — maybe a kind of ‘profanation’ of them. 

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PS: The Digital Heritage blog was set up by Kostas Arvanitis for an optional course in the Art Gallery and Museum Studies MA programme at the Centre for Museology, University of Manchester. They discuss ideas and experience of using digital technologies and designing and producing digital content for museums and galleries — and they use the blog actively in the course. Great initiative!

As Erik points out, Stanford University’s new directory of private and professional blogs written by students, professors and other members of staff is an implicit recognition of the blog medium in the elite academic community. Unfortunately the mediocre quality of many Stanford blogs, including The Stem Cell Blog, diminishes the impact of the endorsement. Why don’t they benchmark ‘their’ blogs instead of listing everything bloggish on campus? (I mean, if I want a list of Stanford blogs I can just search Technorati or Google Blog Search.)

I’m curious about the ‘Sculpture and Touch Symposium’ to be held at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, 16-17 May 2008. The organisers open the call for papers with a quote from Goethe (from Römische Elegien):

Marble comes doubly alive for me then, as I ponder, comparing / Seeing with vision that feels, feeling with fingers that see

and then go on to describe the aim of the meeting:

Since the Renaissance, at least, the medium of sculpture has been linked explicitly to the sense of touch. Sculptors, philosophers and art historians have all related the two, often in strikingly different ways. In spite of this long running interest in touch and tactility, in recent decades vision and visuality have tended to dominate art historical research.

Couldn’t agree more! (This is analogous to Adam’s analysis of contemporary historiography of the body). Questions addressed include:

• In what sense does beholding sculpture enlist tactile sensations, even where direct physical contact is impossible?
• How do sculptors anticipate the possibility of physical interaction with their work?
• Does sculpture have a privileged relationship to the sense of touch?
• Are there sculptures that repel or avoid the sense of touch?
• Is talk about touch and sculpture largely metaphorical?
• In what ways are tactile sensations mediated by vision?
• How far should art historical theory and language draw on the insights of the psychology and physiology of touch?

The organisers invite contributions also from scholars in disciplines beyond art history, including (I suppose) medical historians and students of medical science studies, so this would in fact be a great opportunity to follow up on some of the themes from the Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context workshop in August and the presentation that Jan Eric and I gave at the Artefacts XII meeting in Oslo in September.

In Oslo we were mainly thinking of instruments, but the history of medicine is in fact full of (touchable) sculptures, from early modern sculptures of Saint Sebastian to the contemporary Noëlle robotic birth simulator. And lots in between.

Wonder if art historians would accept the Noëlle birth simulator as sculpture? Or if they think that its sculpture-ness is acquired only after it has been taken out of its immediate medical context and transferred to a museum or art gallery? (I can’t help associate to Damien Hirst’s 1991 pickled shark).

Send 300 word proposals for presentations to Peter Dent (peter.dent@courtauld.ac.uk) before 30 November. More info here.

What do you say, Jan Eric? Shall we give it a try?

What’s so special about physical things? Why not digitalise the collections and lock the stuff away?

In a review of British Museum’s exhibition on Indian paintings (‘Faith, Narrative and Desire’) in London Review of Books (20 September, p. 27), Peter Campbell gives a reason why we shall not over-rely on digitalisation. After having leant over the glass cases to get a close view of the craftmanship in the small and delicate pictures on display, he comments on the restricted diet offered by digital images of ‘things’:

Of course, we sit for many hours in front of screens scanning images. But those images are not also things. One butts eagerly against the glass cases in which this exhibition is housed partly because one’s pleasure in the density of the pigments, the delicacy of the brush-marks — everything that makes them things as well as pictures — tells of an element missing from our own visual diet.

The hunger for “an element missing from our own visual diet”! Nice wording that reminds us of the side-effects of the hegemony of the visual (see, e.g.,here). Things as nutritional supplements to the contemporary over-visualised diet!

As I hinted at a couple of days ago, Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the ‘Museum’ has stimulated my thoughts about how the activities here at Medical Musieon could be understood in terms of a global ‘Museum-at-large’.

The ‘Museum’ is only one side of our coin, however. The other is that as a unit at the University of Copenhagen we belong to the large subfamily of institutions around the world known as ‘university museums’. How shall we understand a unit like ours in terms of a global ‘University-at-large’?

Maybe one could get some inspiration from the upcoming EduFactory on-line seminar described in the ‘Prospectus for Second Round of edu-factory discussion, 25 Nov 2007 – 28 Feb 2008’ (put on-line yesterday).

The point of departure for the EduFactory seminar is “the pervasiveness of the market and the processes of corporatisation that universities in many parts of the world are undergoing”:

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Last January the Postgraduate Life Sciences and Society Network held its second annual symposium (‘Contested Categories’) here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen. Now it’s time for the third symposium in the series: ‘Standardising objects, stabilising categories’, 12-15 June 2008 at the Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Finland. Here’s the announcement:

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The last issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 9) has a story on academics who feel like fakes, frauds, impostors etc., “a cognitive distortion that prevents a person from internalizing any sense of accomplishment” and which seems to be more common than we may think: “Self-doubt and negative feedback weigh heavily on the mind, but praise barely registers”. I guess many of us know the feeling!

The debate following the article is somewhat disconcerting. Some commentators are empathetic, but many seem to believe that feelings of self-doubt in Academia are somehow well-deserved — especially in the humanities, because there are supposedly lots of dubious things going on there: “turtleshit all the way down”, as one says.

Sounds like the wounds from the Science Wars haven’t been healed yet.