Biomedicine in museums

Last time I presented a paper criticising contextualist thinking was at the annual History of Science conference in Washington DC in November 2007 — that’s almost five years ago!

I haven’t had much time over to think about the individualism/contextualism/holism issue. This museum, and a couple of kids, have taken all my time. But a recent talk by Graham Harman has reinvigorated my spirits. Here the abstract to an audio of a keynote titled “Everything Is Not Connected” that Harman gave in Berlin, 2 February 2012:

The idea that everything is interconnected has become a staple of intellectual life. As a related phenomenon, “contextualisation” is now the method of first resort throughout the humanities. This lecture opposes the general trend of emphasising systems and wholes over autonomous individuals. Among the greatest drawbacks of holistic ontology is its inability to explain disruptions and surprises in any system it studies. At best, one posits some sort of “materiality” lying outside all formatted systems that serves as their underground source of change, a theory that fails for a variety of reasons.

Couldn’t agree more!

I’m less sure about Harman’s remedy, object-oriented ontology:

The only alternative is to adopt an object-oriented model of fully formatted entities lying beyond the grasp of the human mind and even of each other. After providing some theoretical background for this claim, I will consider several recent political phenomena that are better understood by an object-oriented approach than a holistic one.

But so far that’s peanuts compared to his criticism of contextualism.

(thumbnail credit: DWinton’s flickr photostream; Creative Commons license)

Today we had our weekly MUSE workshop with in-house historian of psychiatry, Jesper V. Kragh, who spoke — under the title “Changing Gender Differences: Morphine in Denmark, 1860-1960” — about the gender dimension in his current research project on the history of drug abuse in Denmark.

The discussion generated a lot of discussions — and a lively Twitter-stream, including some thoughts about a possible material history of drug addiction.

(thumbnail photo credit here)

Vores egen Nina Bjerglund Andersen skal tale om sociale medier og folkesundhedsvidenskabelig forskningskommunikation i forbindelse med årsmødet i Foreningen for Kandidater i Folkesundhedsvidenskab (FKFSV):

The Lancet er på Twitter, CDC [Center for Disease Control] i USA kører en aktiv Facebook-side og BMJ [British Medical Journal] har mere end 15 blogs kørerende parallelt til deres tidsskrift. Sociale medier stormer frem inden for forskningskommunikation. Med sin interaktive præmis åbner de op for helt nye muligheder for at kommunikere forskning og generelle folkesundhedsbudskaber – og for at forske. Folkesundhedsvidenskaben har allerede vist sig at kunne drage særligt fordel af, at kommunikation nu har fået en ny platform at lege på.

Årsmødet finder sted på Medicinsk Museion, mandag den 14. maj 2012, kl. 16.00-21.00. Det begynder med en omvisning i Medicinsk Museions udstillinger, efterfulgt af Ninas foredrag, som begynder 17.30 (og som efterfølges af generalforsamling).

Ikke-medlemmer i FKFSV er meget velkommen til at lytte med på Ninas foredrag, hvis man tilmelder sig på gf@fkfsv.dk med angivelse af at man kun deltager under oplægget.

Hvis du ikke kan komme, kan du følge oplægget online på www.fkfsv.dk/live, ca kl. 17.30 – 18.30. Se mere her: http://www.fkfsv.dk/arrangementer/56.

Yesterday, David Pantalony from University of Ottawa and the Canada Science and Technology Museum gave a talk in Medical Museion’s MUSE seminar series titled ‘Examine first, ask what it is later: The multiple interpretations of 20th century scientific artifacts’.

David’s presentation gave rise to an intense discussion and an interesting stream of twitter-comments that are eternalised on Storify here.

Some excerpts from the Twitter comments here:

• Engaging objects is a way of resisting a textual constriction of knowledge
• Maybe you cld say that an ‘exhibition curator’ *cares* for objects, while an ‘exhibitionist’ shows off
• Did Pantalony just say: “I don’t really understand exhibitions” ?
• Bottom-up curatorship is a good example of biopolitical production (vide Negri) – after all Latin ‘cura’ means ‘care’
• “Going into the collection my goal is to learn about the world. Not the history of specific technology” (David Pantalony)
• Wonderful to hear a exhibition curator (@SciTechCurator) who takes the collected object as his evident point of departure
• Collection multitude vs. cultural Empire (to paraphrase Hardt and Negri)
• Museum collections are an “immovable foundation of diversity” in a culturally and politically homogenous landscape
• Pantalony: Museum collections as source of diversity to counter cultural, political, artistic & intellectual homogeneity in society.
• Medical device arrives at museum painted one color. Doesn’t mean it spent its working life in that particular skin
• Pantalony neatly gestalts his points about the need for a close engagement with objects through his own enthusiasm.
• Where to start when starting from a museum object? How about asking if people *like* it and why?
• David (@SciTechCurator) radiates a unadulterated love for objects; very contagiuos 🙂
• Pantalony persuasive on starting from the object for curation, display, and also teaching and staff encounters
• Museum objects as trophees!

Under overskriften “Forskningskommunikation 2.0” skrev Kristian H. Nielsen igår på videnskab.dk om nogle af sine indtryk fra den lige afsluttede Public Communication of Science and Technology-konference i Firenze.

Jeg har ikke noget at indvende mod Kristians referat af plenumsessionen som sådan. Det jeg ikke forstår, er at han bruger udtrykket”forskningskommunikation 2.0″ som overskrift på indlægget, uden at gøre opmærksom på, at der under hele konferencen kørte en meget intens Twitter-strøm som baggrund til sessionerne.

Der var en konstant strøm af kommentarer til de enkelte oplæg, sessioner og konferencen som helhed, nogle gange flere i minuttet. Jeg vil tro at der var lige så mange kommentarer på Twitter som der var mundtlige spørgsmål under sessionerne. Flere af deltagerne sparede Twitter-strømmen på Storify, så den kan stadigvæk læses, fx. her.

Grunden til at jeg påpeger dette er, at jeg mener, at Twitter lige nu er det mest interessante udtryk for ånden i begrebet “forskningskommunikation 2.0”. Det blev gjort meget tydligt torsdag eftermiddag under en session, der var arrangeret for at kikke tilbage på tidskriftet Public Understanding of Science’s 20-årige historie. Her sagde PUS-redaktør Martin Bauer bl.a., nærmest i en bisætning, at han ikke vidste hvad en blog var eller hvad den kunne bruges til.

Måske var det bare en dårlig formulering, eller måske var det en provokation, resultatet blev under alle omstændigheder at Twitter-strømmen nærmest eksploderede. Hvordan kunne redaktøren for PUS være så uvidende om sociale medier og deres betydning for forskningskommunikation?

Begrebet “forskningskommunikation 2.0” kan let misforstås (og misbruges). Jeg tror det ville være godt med en bredere diskussion om hvad begrebet står for, hvordan forskningskommunikation via sociale medier kan foregå i dag, og hvad fremtiden kan byde på i den retning.

One of the favourite topics in our museum discussions is ‘presence effects’, i.e., how close encounters with museum objects can convey other (and often deeper) kinds of experiences than those you get from reading a book or hearing a talk (see, e.g., Ken Arnold’s and my article in a recent issue of the journal Isis).

Alistair Kwan, Assistant Director of the Study Group Program at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, University of Rochester, relates a nice example of the difference between reading about a medical treatment in a book and having it demonstrated by means of a museum specimen:

I once did a little experiment: I asked a class to describe to me the phlebotomy apparatus that they’d read about in a history of medicine. They described it at length, with considerable detail. They told me how it worked.

Then I opened a box and showed them a common multiple-blade scarificator and some horn suction cups and brass syringe. “Is this what you were thinking of?” Every one of them said no. All were completely puzzled about how the author had so thoroughly misled them, supposedly in the name of scholarly truth.

I cocked the spring, and released the blades. They heard the snap. Only a few of them caught a glimpse of the blades spinning past; the rest didn’t even see it. Several retreated, pulling in their hands and holding their arms. All seemed to be imagining what it must feel like to have those blades flash through your skin.

None of that had come through in the book at all.

They had thought of something more like gentle surface scratches, or receiving a single, carefully controlled cut.

Not this grid of relatively deep lacerations, inflicted in the blink of an eye.

(from the rete mailing list)

That’s a nice example — would be great to hear more!

(thumbnail courtesy: http://www.phisick.com)

The traditional media image of what ‘a scientist’ looks like is pretty stereotypical, especially in film.

The aim of the This Is What A Scientist Looks Like tumblr-site with the subtitle “Change the perception of who and what a scientist is or isn’t” is to overthrow “the overwhelming stereotype that science is conducted behind closed doors by unapproachable old, white men”, who look like Einstein or Dr No. Take a look in the archive!

For people who, like me, love to watch human physiognomies, this is a feast.

(thanks 103.7FM for the thumbnail)

I came across this tweet from Archimuse the other day:

OK, it’s just an ephemeral twitter post. But both the original tweet and the retweet are from influential sites (Archimuse and Museums and the Web, respectively), whose words should normally be taken seriously.

So when they say that museum gallery rooms which are not assisted by many media (including, I guess, social media) are ‘stupid’, I think one has to take that claim seriously as more than an accidental tweet.

There may be ‘stupid’ ways of building galleries and displaying material artefacts. And there may also be ‘stupid’ ways of using social media in museums. There are plenty of opportunities for being ‘stupid’ in museums and on the web.

But to suggest that building a gallery without social media enhancement is ‘stupid’ per se — that claim is both ignorant and arrogant.

Ignorant because it shows a lack of understanding of the importance of unmediated engagement with material culture.

And arrogant, because it is made from the position of a technology (new media), which is only about ten years old, in contrast to the tradition for unmediated display of material museum artefacts, which has existed for hundreds of years.

And that’s why, in spite of being as long-time practitioner of new media in museums, I think the notion of ‘stupid rooms’ is — stupid!

‘Biomarkers’, i.e., chemical substances that are used as indicators of biological (especially pathological) conditions, is one of these important concepts in contemporary biomedicine that seem to be almost impossible as an exhibition topic — partly because the idea of ‘biomarker’ is so abstract and partly because the involved artefacts and substances don’t have much ‘presence’.

Unfortunately, because the search for biomarkers for diagnosing diseases or targets for personalised tharapies is accelerating. And maybe an innovative exhibition curator could learn something after all from the forthcoming conference ‘Towards personalized medicine? Exploring biomarkers’, organised by the Life-Science-Governance Research Platform at the University of Vienna in late June.

The aim of the conference is to explore, from the perspective of the humanities and the social sciences, the implications of biomarker research for “the daily practices of medical research and health care, and what kinds of futures are generated through the emerging biomarker practices”.

Proposed presentations should either explore translation processes of biomarker candidates, and/or discuss the various effects that biomarkers create, and explore the cultural impacts of the new developments in the biomarker field in biomedicine and society. Abstracts of roughly 300 words should be sent to doris.bichlwagner@univie.ac by April 22; accepted presenters will be notified a week later. The conference will take place at the University of Vienna, Austria, 28-28 June. More info here.

(thumbnail courtesy: Foundation for the NIH)

The Museums and the Web 2012 conference in San Diego has just ended.

In addition to attending the meeting and participating in the twitter backchannel, members of the museum community nominated and voted for their favourite museum websites:

Here’s the result of the popular vote for Best of the Web 2012 (People’s Choice):

After the popular vote, the jury voted for the following winners in ten categories: