May 2008

I’ve always been pro-EU, mainly because I believe national borders and national sovereignty is an 18-20th century anachronism. The only thing that can raise second thoughts in my mind about the blessings of the Europan Union is the lack of transparency of its administrative system. Consider this one: I’ve just been invited to serve as a reviewer of research applications to the European Science Foundation (ESF). The invitation letter links to a registration website which I could access with a personal ID and password. So I did, and filled out all the necessary personal and professional information, and closed it — only to discover that I couldn’t print out the registration form for my own record or even get back to the site to correct the data. Once closed it remains closed; the ID/pw is only valid once, and I didn’t get a new set.

In other words, I cannot see or correct the information I’ve fed into the ESF-system (“Please note that once you have logged on and completed the form your access will be deactivated”, the screen says). I feel like K. in The Castle. I guess I could call or write to the admin assistants in the ESF office and ask them to be so kind as to allow me to read about myself — but I don’t know if they will grant me this privilege, and it will anyway cost me time and energy to do so. Why not allow reviewers direct on-line access to their own files? After all, even Facebook (which has been criticized severely) allows us to both read our personal pages and change them.

Now and then I’m hunting for arguments against the digital museum in order to make a case for the nicely old-fashioned embodied physical museum instead. This morning’s on-line issue of The Guardian made my day: computer keyboards harbour myriads of nasty bacteria. According to the article (which is taken from today’s issue of Which?, the on-line consumer product review magazíne), a microbiologist who swabbed keyboards in a typical London office for bacteria (plus toilet seats and door handles for comparison) ended up removing one of the office’s keyboards because it was five times dirtier than a typical lavatory seat and contained 150 times the acceptable limit of bacteria. Well, this study doesn’t look like a serious epidemiological survey — but in my accumulation of arguments against the digital museum, any anecdotal evidence will do.

… in the humanities as Adam wrote in the introduction to his thesis. And they are also in the mind. ‘Embodied knowledge’ is a much discussed notion of science studies nowadays. And therefore the Institute for the History of Science and Technology’s Graduate Student Society at the University of Toronto is organizing its fourth annual one-day conference on the theme ‘Embodied Knowledge and Bodies of Knowledge’. Here’s the call for papers:

In response to accounts of science that focus on science as the product of minds and ideas, historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science have started focusing on the role that the body and material practices play in producing, transmitting, and acquiring knowledge. Examining the embodied practices of those involved in scientific research has allowed science studies scholars to paint a rich portrait of the processes involved in knowledge production. Attention to bodies and to material practices has been a way for historians and sociologists to uncover the social and cultural history of science, and for philosophers to explore the epistemology of experimental practice. Although this is an interesting and welcome turn, the concept of “embodied knowledge” itself has not received much direct scrutiny and raises a series of questions:

• What are the relations between embodied knowledge and propositional knowledge?
• Can certain kinds of knowledge be transmitted only through embodied practices?
• Is embodied knowledge distinct from tacit knowledge? Are they the same?
• Can embodied knowledge reside in non-human objects?
• What is the relationship between theory, experimentation, and the embodied knowledge possessed by scientists?
• How and when does the embodied knowledge of scientists constitute expertise?

Graduate students (sorry all you postdocs out there!) are invited to submit paper and panel proposals. Send an email abstract (up to 250 words) to HAPSAT@gmail.com not later than tomorrow (!), Friday 2 May. Read more here (sorry for the delay, it was announced already in February the first tinme)