I wrote last week about the 3rd annual UK conference on ‘Science and the Public’ to be held in Manchester, 21-22 June. I thought I had missed the dead-line, but it turned out they had extended it, so I sent in an abstract—and to my pleasure it’s just been accepted by the program committee. Here you are:

Science blogging, singularities, and the multitude of technoscience

Within the last couple of years, blogging has emerged as a new genre for STM communication. The number of medical blogs and science blogs is growing exponentially, and famous science blogs like The Daily Transcript, In the Pipeline, MedGadgets, and Partial Immobilizaton have tens of thousands of readers each week. How can the rise of science blogging as an alternative form of science com-munication be understood? Is it best understood in terms of ’science’ and ‘the public’, or does the science blogging phenomenon suggest other, more critically based, dichotomies? In this paper I will argue that science blogging is better understood in terms of Michael Hardt’s and Tony Negri’s conceptualisation of globalisation in terms of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’. Science is financed and managed by a network of national and transnational state organisations and corporations, while the overwhelming number of laboratory and field workers constitute a global knowledge proletariat. These different positions in the global technoscientific field entail two different domains of communication practices which correspond, roughly, to the cultures of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’, respectively. Blogs can thus be intepreted as ’singularities’: there are few group blogs, and even fewer corporate, organisational or national blogs. The large majority of blogs don’t represent any movements, parties, institutions or organisations; instead they function, in a Deleuzian sense, as ”an escape from the dominant codes and majoritarian categories—including those of ‘identity politics’—that otherwise trap the singular in passive or static relations” (Tormey, 2006). Yet blogs are not individualistic in a traditional way: many bloggers identify themselves by pseudonyms. Nor are they solipsistic: there is a high degree of cross-linking between blogs. Furthermore the current dominant mode of thinking among bloggers is (at least now) one of criticism and resistance.

As we announced in an earlier post, a crew from Swedish Television visited Medical Museion in mid February. The first five minute program on the history of medicine was sent tonight—you can see it here (click “Fråga doktorn 080331″ and run the clip forward until about 8’40”). Not much contemporary biomedicine though, I’m afraid — mostly 18th century stuff.

The second five minute episode will be sent next Monday at 6.15 (or after 8 PM) and will contain somewhat more recent history.

‘Translational medicine’ is usually understood as the transmission of knowledge and data from bench to bedside. But there are also other kinds of ‘translations’ involving medical knowledge and data. For example, the whole biomed-art field—and like in this example—biomed-design:

MYBrain (2007) is a table lamp designed by Alexander Lervik (Lervik Design, Stockholm) in the form of a model of the designer’s own brain, in turn based on an MR scan made at Karolinska Institutet. From Lervik’s own website, mediated by Boing Boing.

There are meetings on the public engagement with science, technology and medicine all over the place, with different scopes and in different formats. The big international meeting PCST-10 in Malmö in late June has an official science policy-making ring about it, although some of the individual papers and seminars (like this humble one) make their best to avoid the meainstream promotional approach that still dominates much of the science communication field.

For a more critical approach to the study of the public communication of technology and/or medicine, the third annual UK conference on ‘Science and the Public’ to be held in Manchester 21-22 June is probably a better choice. The conference topics include:

Patients and publics in health services
Notions of expertise in the public
Public science and science policy
Technological development and the public
Science communication theory in practice
News and entertainment media
Science on the internet
Science, technology and medicine in museums
Public interest and ‘the public interest’

Unfortunately the deadline for submissions is overdue (14 March), but it will probably be possible to attend without a paper — see more on the conference website.

As we’ve announced before, the 14th meeting of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences will be held in Edinburgh, 17-21 September. Now the website is up for paper proposals and registration. This year’s meeting will be devoted particularly to aspects of “the use, culture, history, art and manufacture of models, prosthetics and surgical interventions” and to work towards a European-wide electronic database of body part models and prosthetics held in medical collections. So activate your prosthetic brain and produce an abstract before 15 April!

Lynn Bethke‘s MA thesis—‘Constructing Connections: A Museological Approach to Blogging’—from the Museology graduate program at University of Washington in Seattle (downloadable here) contains some interesting analyses of the benefits (and sometimes obstacles) of blogging for museums. “Museums and blogs have a future together”, she concludes her survey, “although the path is not yet clear”, and continues:

The potential and versatility of blogging is an excellent option for museums, which are often slow to respond to current events in their primary format of exhibits, to become a more relevant presence online. A blog can act as a supplement to an exhibit, an informational byline, or an announcement board. All options have both benefits and costs, and it will be up to each institution to determine if blogging is an appropriate course of action for it (p. 74).

A nice and carefully referenced study which gives food for thought for everyone engaged in museum blogging. Cf. also Jim Spadaccini’s Ideum-post last October on the rapid growth and diversification of museum blogging.

One question that Lynn Bethke does not address, however, is that which Camilla raised in an earlier post on this blog, namely what an exhibition would look like if it was organised as a blog? I haven’t found this question raised (or answered) anywhere. Maybe a topic for a PhD in museology somewhere? 

Is the web taking visitors away from museums? Apparently not, if we shall believe a recent study from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (US) which concludes that “the amount of use of the Internet is positively correlated with the number of in-person visits to museums and has a positive effect on in-person visits to public libraries.” For an overview of the study we are referred to this powerpoint (it didn’t load when I tried, however; added 23 March: one has to save the file to one’s harddrive first …).
(thanks to Im in ur museum blogz by Lynn Bethke, also author of ‘Constructing Connections: A Museological Approach to Blogging’, her Masters’ thesis, which should in principle be is downloadable here but unfortunately wasn’t available today).

Another question is what the two genres can learn from each other—see our earlier posts here and here.

Emm Barnes has just summarised the ‘Communicating Medicine: Objects and Objectives’ workshop in Manchester, Friday 7 March. Her report focuses on the relation between medical history scholarship and medical curatorship. Read it here. (For an earlier report, see here.)

At the occasion of the 60th birthday of Svante Lindqvist, Director of the Nobel Museum in Stockholm (and member of our Advisory Board), a one-day celebration seminar will be held on Friday 25 April. Under the heading “Science on Stage”, John Heilbron, Tore Frängsmyr, Paolo Galuzzi, Sven Widmalm, Jim Bennett, and Kjell Espmark will raise questions about the role of science in public life and the relation between science, theatre and music, and their talks will be interspersed by music and theatre performances. Access is restricted to registered participants—contact Ulf Larsson, ulf@nobel.se, before April 14. Full program (in Swedish) below:
Read More

Here’s an interesting public-engagement-with-medicine project: Over the last couple of years the award winning Triangle theatre company in Coventry has developed a concept called the Immersive Museum Theatre. Now the Centre for the History of Medicine in Warwick is working with the company to use “museum collections – archives and artefacts – and historic locations as springboards for the development of character, and in the creation of an environment in which to become ‘immersed’ in the material”:

Action is devised by participants engaging with the material, and also drawing from their own experience, by playing out and maintaining roles in group dynamics. This devising process is further enhanced by the input of specialists supplying information – specialists who become participants in the process. While projects usually focus on historical moments to provide themes, they also provide scope for the exploration of contemporary issues.

Sounds like an excellent idea (read more here) for a medical museum—more exciting than most so called ‘science theatres’.

(thanks to Molly Rogers for the tip)