The recently published Technology and Medical Practice: Blood, Guts and Machines, edited by Ericka Johnson och Boel Berner (Ashgate), might be interesting reading for medical museum curators. Says the blurb:

The advanced technologies being used in diagnosis and care within modern medicine, whilst supporting and making medical practices possible, may also conflict with established traditions of medicine and care. What happens to the patient in a technologized medical environment? How are doctors’, nurses’ and medical scientists’ practices changed when artefacts are involved? How is knowledge negotiated, or relations of power reconfigured? Technology and Medical Practice addresses these developments and dilemmas, focusing on various practices with technologies within hospitals and sociotechnical systems of care. Combining science and technology studies with medical sociology, the history of medicine and feminist approaches to science, this book presents analyses of artefacts-in-use across a variety of settings within the UK, USA and Europe, and will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of science and technology alike.

For contents, see: http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=9922&edition_id=12413

Just learned from Beth how to embed a YouTube video  into a powerpoint slide — see this screencast. You need Powerpoint 2007 (and of curse a live Internet connection). Beth wants to put this trick into the Trainer’s Bag of Social Media Tricks.

We have just started a search for 1-2 positions at the level of Associate Professor (alternatively Assistant Professor).

As readers of this blog probably knows, Medical Museion is an integrated research and museum unit for promoting medical science communication based on the material and visual medical heritage. The research profile is centered around the contemporary history of the biomedical sciences, medical science communication studies, and studies of the production of the material and visual medical scientific heritage. We have a world-class collection of historical medical artefacts and images, an active program for the acquisitioning and preservation of the contemporary biomedical and biotechnological heritage, a permanent medical-historical public gallery, and an innovative temporary exhibition program.

We are looking for two new members of faculty to contribute to our integrated research, teaching, heritage and outreach programme focussing on late 20th century and contemporary medical and health sciences in a cultural, aesthetic and historical perspective. The aim of the programme is to develop new modes of research-based collecting, exhibition making and web-based outreach by combining scientific content, cultural interpretation and aesthetic expression in innovative ways.

On the outreach side, we are developing research-based science communication practices for a variety of audiences – spanning from health professionals to the general public – in the form of exhibitions and web products, and with special attention to the aesthetics of science communication.

On the acquisition side, we are in the process of developing research-based curatorial practices (heritage production) in close cooperation with research institutions, hospitals, pharma, biotech and medical device companies, and patient organisations in the region (‘museum 2.0’) .

The appointees are required to do research at an international level and research-based teaching, however most of teaching obligations are substituted with museum work.

Read the official full job description below.
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In the early morning — just before Johanna began to make the usual noices to indicate she wanted to be transferred to our bed for a last cosy hour of sleep — my eyes fell on this sentence in a piece by Douglas Haddow in Adbusters (‘The coming barbarism’):

Rather than Bourriaud’s altermodernism, we should pursue an alter-realism: dispense with the art gallery altogether and make reality our experimentation lab.

I admit it’s taken out of context. Nevertheless, try to translate the sentence into the domain of science/medical museums and sci- and bioart, as represented by, for example, the Wellcome Collection:

Dispense with the sci- and bioart gallery and make scientific reality our experimentation lab.

In other words, don’t move the aesthetic out of the laboratory into galleries and museum exhibitions (this is what all sci- and bioartists so far have been doing). Go to the lab instead, do some real experiments and re-frame this practice into an aesthetic experiment within the walls of the lab itself. The lab is your art gallery.

All of us who have been following Nina’s blog about museum 2.0 are happy to hear that her book project about visitor participation in museums, science centers, libraries and art galleries has come to a temporary end.

She describes The Participatory Museum as “a practical guide to visitor participation … the nuts and bolts of successful participatory projects” in cultural institutions. The first half of the book focuses on principles, the other on practice, mission and staff culture. It’s available both in paperback and as a PDF/ebook, but Nina is also about to publish a free online version later this month.

True to the participatory spirit of her blog and book project (she has involved hundreds of volunteers in the writing and production process) Nina will continue to make the website for the book a place for continued discussion and debate.

Nina’s visit here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen in October was inspiring and I’m looking very much forward to reading her book — and to see the reviews and the comments on her website.

When I opened my mailbox this morning I found the following enticing message:

Hello Thomas
I’m writing this to let you know about a brand new featured post we just made over here at Medicareer entitled, “Top 50 Biotech Blogs.” I thought that you and your readers over at Biomedicine on Display might find it to be an interesting read. Please do let me know if you have any feedback — http://phlebotomytechnicianprograms.org/2010/top-50-biotech-blogs/
Warm Regards,
Emily Johnston
Medicareer

Tired as I always am seven o’clock in the morning when I’m preparing breakfast for Johanna I clicked on the link and found a site with a nice long list of blogs — with ours at the top, fairly decently described. But, of course, the site has no contact address, no link to a main site, and no “Emily Johnston” at a company called Medicareer exists on the web. So what do these guys actually get out of bringing all this blog information together? Have I installed malicious code now by clicking on their site? Anyone who knows?

A recent call for submissions to the journal Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies makes me think (again and again and again) about the unfathomable gulf between on the one hand biomedical practice and on the other hand literary and cultural studies about biomedicine.

Concentric asks for papers for an issue on ‘bios’ — i.e., the old Greek word for ‘life course’ which has been used by post-thinkers since Foucault (Agamben, Hardt, Negri and others):

How then are we now to rethink human life in terms of our increasingly intimate relations with machines, perhaps even our posthumanity? How are we to evaluate our “prosthetic life”? How are we now to define, interpret, understand concepts of law and polis (government, nation-state), state power, capitalism and globalization, in relation to human­ and also earthly plant and animal­ life (bios, ecos)? What new and unforeseen power struggles, perhaps even conflicts between human and non-human, life and death, might now be coming into play? In this era of the new bios, and new ecos, must we establish a new bio-(eco-)ethics, construct a new bio-(eco-)subjectivity?

We must ask once again, as philosophers asked thousands of years ago, “What makes us live?” “What ensures our existence?” “What is it that we call human life?” Can we look at (our own human) life anew and write about it afresh? How may the traditional literary genres, and specifically those concerned with life-writing, the writing of memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, be changing in terms of their form and content and their media of expression? What is the significance of “life-writing” at this particular historical moment?

This is all very mainstream ad nauseam — I always wonder if these literary and cultural studies guys have ever paid a visit to a life science lab? And what would their jargon sound like if they had?

Besides the preservation and display of the contemporary medical heritage, one of my major research interests is the methodology of writing the history of contemporary science (see, e.g., The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology (1997) and The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology and Medicine: Writing Recent Science (with Ron Doel, 2006)).

Now I am beginning to think about a third volume in the ‘series’ to catch up with new trends in science historiography. One of the most interesting issues — both from a museological and historiographical point of view — is how historians should deal with the growing avalanche of scientific digital documents.

I.e., how to preserve, utilise, and make sense of the enormous output of digitalised desk and laboratory data for the writing and displaying of contemporary history of science? Not just gigabytes of text documents (like manuscripts, electronic lab notebooks and emails), but also terabytes of quantitative experimental data — not to forget digitalised images and material things that embody such data (such a microarrays and biobanks).

Our guest blogger Martin Fenner wrote a very inspiring post about digital preservation a few weeks ago. “It’s surprising”, Martin concluded, “that we have barely started to think about digital preservation”.

Another scholar who has thought about the problem is university archivist and library administration scientist Christopher Prom, currently a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at the Centre for Archive and Information Studies, University of Dundee.

Prom is giving a talk here in Copenhagen next Thursday (4 March), titled “Preserving the ‘Papers’ of 21st Century Science”, in which he will review the current state of work in preserving digital records and provide some suggestions regarding methods and tools that archives and others stakeholders can use to make sure that the electronic record of the 21st century will be accessible also in the 22nd. Here’s his abstract:

We cannot understand the full impact of scientific work without access to the correspondence, notes, and other materials that scientists generate on a daily basis. But how, in the digital era, can we best preserve the ‘papers’ generated by scientists? Such records are stored as mere electronic impulses, distributed across many locations, and written in formats that cannot be rendered without machines and software. As a result, rich historical sources, such as correspondence in email format, are at risk. Recent events in East Anglia demonstrate that such records are susceptible to hacking and misrepresentation in the short term. In the long term, they may be even more susceptible to loss through corruption or neglect.

The venue for Prom’s talk is the Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17; it starts at 2.15 pm. Copenhagen historian of physics Finn Aaserud organises the event.

We’re just about to announce two new faculty positions here at Medical Museion — which raises the perennial problem of how to select the best candidates from dozens or more written applications. Seeing and hearing a person in live action often says more than thousands of words and an impressive CV. That’s why we interview selected applicants. But interviews are time-consuming and cost travel money for those involved.

The solution may be YouTube. Just read on The Scholarly Kitchen that Tufts University has now embraced the YouTube generation. Tufts’ official admissions criteria read:

Share a one-minute video that says something about you, upload it to YouTube or another easily accessible website, and give us the URL. What you do or say is totally up to you.

The videos are purely optional, but about 6% of 15,000 applicants submitted them.

Well, I’m afraid our university is not prepared to use this method for job applicants yet. But wait another couple of years …

The most relevant academic question this year is asked by Paul Glasziou (Centre for Evidence-Based medicine, Oxford University), who gives a talk with this title in the Institute of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, on Monday 15 March, at 10am (Øster Farimagsgade 5, room 15.3.15). The talk is based on his and I. Chalmers’s article ‘Avoidable waste in the production and reporting of research evidence’, which was published in Lancet two years ago (vol. 374, 86-89).