We thought our storage facilities were warm enough to work in, even in the winter. But the current Arctic spell — which is a proof of the simple fact that global warming isn’t evenly distributed around the world — has forced one of our external designers, Mikael Thorsted, to wear winter cloths when inspecting artefacts for our new exhibition:

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What is going on? Well, ‘Primary Substances‘ — the first exhibition in our brand new extramural temporary exhibit area in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences — is closing tomorrow. It will be followed by ‘Healthy Aging’, which approaches the major global challenge of ageing (sic!, see disclaimer below) in three different ways — through science, art, and cultural history:

Through science: Studies of the process of aging is a rapidly growing international research field. How can the biological and social sciences and the humanities help us experience a more healthy old age? In a series of wall panels we are presenting the new multidisciplinary Center for Healthy Aging, University of Copenhagen, established in 2009 by means of a grant from the Nordea Foundation.

Through art: Science is not very good at capturing the existential dimension of aging or visualizing the accumulated layers of life experience. But that’s something that art can do. Acclaimed photographer Liv Carlé Mortensen has created a photo and interview collage series of portraits of Danish centennarians, called ‘100 Light Years’ (we are displaying the series of commissioned photo collages that Liv made for our intramural ‘Oldetopia’ exhibition two years ago).

Through cultural history: Finally, aging has its own visual and material cultural symbols. Two showcases in the lounge area are going to display historical objects from our rich historical collections that represent four kinds of aids that have been associated with old age — artefacts that have helped us overcome the deterioration of bodily functions.

The show is produced by myself together with Bente Vinge Pedersen, Jonas Bejer Paludan, Ion Meyer and Nanna Gerdes from Medical Museion. Design and graphics is taken care of by Mikael and Lars Møller Nielsen, Studio 8, Copenhagen.

We are also working closely together with Tina Gottlieb, administrative head of the Center for Healthy Aging, and the team leaders of the Center’s five research programmes, who have contributed text proposals and images for the wall panels. But lots of editing and re-writing, because few academic scholars really understand how little text you can actually display on a 125×85 cm wall panel 🙂

‘Healthy Ageing’ is scheduled to open on Monday, 8 February. More about it later.

(Disclaimer: for purely irrational reasons, I don’t like the American spelling of ‘aging’, but prefer Br. Eng. ‘ageing’. However, the Center for Healthy Aging, which pays for the show, has adopted the American spelling practice, so we courteously adjust to this fact to avoid a bi-lingual show.)

I’ve just received the announcement for the 11th annual meeting of Universeum (the European network for university heritage) in my inbox.

The meeting will be held in Uppsala, 17-20 June, on the theme ‘University Heritage: Present and Future’. The organisers invite submissions of papers devoted to “academic heritage in its broadest sense, tangible and intangible, namely the preservation, study, access and promotion of university collections, museums, archives, libraries, and buildings of historical and scientific significance”.

Academic heritage institutions traditional roles are collecting, preservation, research and teaching. Increasingly, they are expected to develop public programs and exhibitions as well as to assume a stronger role in marketing their university’s identity. These roles can pose considerable challenges. How can we position ourselves within the growing constraints of generating external funding, creating new audiences and keeping our institutions’ identity?

The present and future status of university museums is a very important topic for a museum like ours (we are a unit under the University of Copenhagen). But frankly, this call doesn’t sound as inspiring as it could have been. I had expected a more clearly defined theme for the meeting, focusing more on, for example, the complicated transition phase that university museums are in at the moment — squeezed as they are between, on the one hand, schemes for national research governance based on scientometrics etc. and, on the other hand, new market-oriented and populist national museum policies. Both trends are eroding traditional scholarly ideals for the production and preservation of and engagement with the academic heritage.

And frankly, the format of the meeting looks pretty uninspiring too. Proposals are invited for the usual 20 min (including 5 min discussion!) presentation format only. I would have expected a somewhat more imaginative spectrum of formats, like panels, group discussions, small workshops on selected topics, etc. I don’t expect online Twitter-sessions, but if Universeum has the ambition to set agendas for the future of European university museums, it should strive for sharper thematic programmes and a more up-to-date meeting format.

But one can of course be happily surprised. And Uppsala is absolutely gorgeous in early June. So if you haven’t been discouraged by this post, send your proposal + short bio + short mention of research interests to universeum@gustavianum.uu.se — before 15 March, 2010. 

More info here: http://www.gustavianum.uu.se/universeum2010.

If you happen to be near or in Philadelphia the weekend after next, you may consider attending the upcoming Medical Film Symposium. A awesome lot of film-makers, -theoreticians, and -historians will watch and discuss films that explore “the relationship between moving images and medical science”.

The Mütter Museum (no link provided, they have a malicious virus on their website right now!!, no kidding) will host the well-rounded Saturday program and the Friday night screening will take place in the Pennsylvania Hospital Surgical Theatre, which (Joanna says) is the oldest surgical theatre in the United States).

See the screening and academic program here. Register before Friday, 15 January. Joanna will attend the symposium in the role of “official blogger” for the event, so we can all expect to read well-written accounts about what went on — for example, whether the Saturday night party will turn into a symposium in the original meaning of the word, or not.

Musician John Boswell has just released the third part (called ‘The Unbroken Thread’) in his Symphony of Science series of music videos — the explicit goal of which is

to bring scientific knowledge and philosophy to the masses, in a novel way, through the medium of music.

Boswell’s thing is to remix and tune the spoken words of famous scientists like Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking etc. with high-profiled popularizers (David Attenborough, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkin, etc.) and combine them with footage and his own electronic music compositions.

I really don’t know what to say. One side of me just loves to watch and hear the four secular gospels of the creation of the world — i.e., the history of the Universe, the history of the Earth, the history of Life, and the history of Humankind — after all, we atheists too need mind-expanding narratives we can live by:-). One of the most awesome narratives (combining the last three secular gospels into one) I’ve seen is Claire L. Evans’ ‘Evolution in 60 seconds’.

On the other hand, there are limits to what my aesthetic sensibilities can cope with. And even though ‘The Unbroken Thread’ is occasionally able to raise the right feelings of secular sublimity, Boswell’s re-mixing of pretentious voices, his outdated electronic tunes and the use of worn-out molecular animations combines into a major artistic flop. How can he for a moment believe that he will be able to bring scientific knowledge and philosophy “to the masses” (what a phrase to use!) with this kind of music video production?

I’m sure The Knife together with Korb would be able to create a much more sophisticated musical and visual rendering of the four secular gospels of creation.

The Mori Art Museum in Tokyo is currently showing an exhibition called ‘Medicine and Art: Imagining a Future for Life and Love’, showcasing 150 works of art — some are installations designed by artists, other are historical medical artefacts that are contextually transmogrified into art objects by being situated in the art museum space, like these:

From Boing Boing.

Adds to my general impression that the identity of a medical artefact — as a historical museum artefact, as a clinical tool, as an art object, etc — is all about context. Framing means everything.

Can’t resist forwarding a query from Keni Sturgeon, curator at Mission Mill Museum (a textile museum in Oregon), on the ACUMG-list. Keni, who also teaches museum studies at Western Oregon University, is in the midst of planning “a graduate course on Small Museums” and would like some input from other small museums, especially college and university museums/galleries:

So, if you were in a position to hire a new, entry level employee fresh out of a museum studies program in grad school, what things would you want them to know about working in a small museum? What would be the top three skills they could come with? In what ways do you see small museums as being different from mid-large size museums and how does that difference impact your job?

Good question — what kind of skills do we look for when interviewing applicants for jobs in a small university museum like ours?

• We cannot afford to hire people who are too specialised; a small museum curator needs to be a jack of all trades.
• At the same time he/she must be a master of at least one trade to uphold general academic-curatorial standards.
• All museums want staff with excellent collaborative skills — but for a small museum the lack of such skills is a disaster.
• Academic-curatorial staff in small museums is expected to be willing to do all kinds of jobs, from cleaning artefacts for the next exhibition (which always opens next week) to writing trail-blazing academic articles in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals.

What else are we looking for?

(added on 11 January):
Quoted from the discussion on ACUMG-list:
Lesley Wright, Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College suggests:

I would be looking for an employee who writes and speaks well, who is organized and task oriented, and who is willing to pitch in and do a wide range of tasks. The biggest difference to me between small museums and larger museums is the lack of specialization. I direct (e.g., administer), but I also curate and handle much of our public relations. And I teach. And I can design an exhibition if I need to. And I write grants. And I lead tours. I would hope any graduate of a museums studies program could do budgeting, and knows how to work with a budget. Grant writing would be a big plus. A familiarity with art handling would be great. And a desire to make art accessible to a wide public is a must. I would also welcome a recent grad’s knowledge about the wider field of museums, as we are all prone to getting buried in our work and lose sight of the bigger picture. Finally, prima donas need not apply. I need employees who can work well with a wide range of people.

and Phillip Earenfight, The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, adds

Sincere devotion to serving the public and passion for the work.
Good judgment.
Flexibility and creativity on the fly with a eye towards keeping priorities in order.
Keen visual skills.
Solid writing and speaking.
Attention to detail.

Great list of qualities (virtues?) needed by a museum like ours. Any more comments?

Science centers — institutions for the promotion of public engagement with science and technology — have mushroomed all over the world since Frank Oppenheimer started Exploratorium in San Francisco more than forty years ago. (Jessica has just written an interesting review of K. C. Cole’s recent biography of Oppenheimer).

Would you agree with this view of the typical science center?

Situated in industrial-looking steel, glass and concrete buildings painted in bright colours, these institutions understand their basic aim as promoting a warm and cozy excitement about science and technology, especially to young people. They do so by presenting science in a flashy and Disneylandish way and by serving a variety of fast foods and ice cream in the cafeteria. The heart of a typical science center is a floor space crowded with ‘apparatuses’ and ‘installations’ where the kids can do ‘interactive experiments’, meaning they are supposed to push buttons and watch awesome electric sparks before rushing off to the next ‘experiment’; there’s a lot of running and yelling in science centers. All this is called ‘informal learning’, which means that the kids may (!) return home with some elementary understanding of gravity or electricity or the migration patterns of birds, knowledge which they would otherwise probably have needed several minutes to acquire by reading a book or by paying attention in class for a moment. But they surely have had fun — and so have their accompanying dads (and moms?). Most importantly the risk of meeting drunkards and abusive adults is much lesser than in an ordinary amusement park. You can safely leave your kid alone and wait for them to be so exhausted that you can bring them home and get them to bed early.

I’m afraid many of my colleagues would hardly object against this deliberately caricaturised view of an ideal-typical science center. These institutions have a notoriusly bad press among curators and historians of science.

But maybe it’s time to change this attitude, because it seems like the science center institution is about to come to age after decades of uncritical expansion.

In the announcement for its 21st annual conference in 2010, the European network of science centers (Ecsite) admits that they may so far have presented science in a too positive and uncritical light. Therefore, this year’s meeting will take “a critical and thought-provoking look at the work of science centres”: “What happens when we stop playing it safe? What risks do we take in our exhibitions and programmes?”.

Actually similar kinds of self-critical questions were asked in some of the earlier Ecsite-conferences. For example, the 2006 meeting asked whether science centres are for children only — and what the kids are really learning?

Are questions like these signs of the beginning of a fundamental change in the science center as an institution? Could it be the case that science centers are becoming more interested in adult audiences, a change which of course demands a less naïve attitude to science and technology?

If so, they are mirroring the tendency in history of science museums to focus more and more on outreach — unfortunately at the expense of their collections and their research programmes. Are we, for better or for worse, witnessing a convergence between the science center and the science museum as institutions?

If you are interested in the history of the body and happen to be in Copenhagen in mid-January, you may consider attending a guest lecture by Ulrike Thoms from Institut für Geschichte der Medizin, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, titled ‘Consuming Bodies: The human body in the light of science’. The lecture takes place on Tuesday 19 January at 2pm in the new Humanities Faculty building (Amager campus), room 22.0.47. The lecture is arranged by the Danish Research School for History and the postgraduate programme at the Dept of History, U Copenhagen.

I think first-person accounts — that is, acccounts about oneself and one’s relation to the world told in ‘I’-form, as opposed to accounts of ‘you’, ‘he/she’ or ‘they’ — are fascinating. Such accounts tell something about the people who produce them and they also reveal much about their authors’ relations to others and the culture and environment they live in. In fact, one of my basic historiographical convictions is that even the concepts, theories and objects of science, technology and medicine are, at least to some extent, first-person accounts (‘science as autobiography‘).

First-person accounts appear in many forms, which you could call ‘genres’ (or ‘sub-genres’), like ‘autobiography’, ‘self-portrait’, ‘memoir’, etc. Turns out that the genre specialists Jean-Louis Jeannelle (known for his studies of the (anti)memoirs of André Malraux) and Philippe Lejeune (renown specialist in the study of autobiography) are currently interested in how we define, and in which terms we describe, different kinds of such first-person accounts, especially non-fictional accounts (i.e., excluding novels, short stories etc. in ‘I’-form).

Jeanelle and Lejeune are particularly interested in the linguistic distinctions we make between the different genres in which personal experience can be narrated, and they want us to reflect about the terms we use and to make us question our assumptions about them. They use the term ‘non-fictional first-person accounts’ as though it were a neutral description, but this isn’t true, of course — as they rightly point out in an email message to colleagues, this label “needs to be examined as much as any other label”.

And here are their seven questions they want us to think about:

1. What are the customary generic classifications used in your language to designate the different kinds of personal narratives, such as autobiography, journal, testimony? Can you provide a comprehensive list of these terms, and cite, in each case, a work that could serve as model for that category?

2. Among these various categories, are there any which you perceive as having fallen out of use or having been discarded because they no longer correspond to the texts that are being produced? Have others become more important over time? In both cases, what explains these changes?

3 Are there one or more categories that seem to you to function as overarching categories, under which other forms of life narrative can be classified?

4. What is your own special field of research? What are the principal generic terms that you use in that research? What synonyms do you use to avoid excessive repetition?

5. What sub-genres of non-fictional first-person accounts seem to you to be the most studied in your country? Which ones seems to attract the least attention or to be unduly neglected?

6. What theoretical works have the greatest influence on you and your colleagues?

7. Do you think that these widely read theoretical works have modified the way in which the different sub-genres of non-fictional first-person accounts are classified?

Jeanelle and Lejeune are interested in all kinds of non-fictional ‘first-person accounts’ — not just of scientists and medical doctors, of course, that’s just my own special interest — please send your answers to: jeannelle@fabula.org and philippe.lejeune@autopacte.org

As one of those historians of contemporary science, technology and medicine who have tried my hands and brain extensively on interviewing scientists about the past (see, e.g., here and here), I have pretty ambiguous feelings about ‘oral history’ as a historical specialty in its own right

If you want to study the history of the science, technology and medicine of the near past, you often have no other choice but questioning living actors, since most written, visual and material sources aren’t yet deposited in archives and museums. Speaking with living historical actors also give a special additional flavour to a narrative based on written, visual and material source material. On the other hand, too many ‘oral historians’ use sloppy methodologies, ask questions without being properly prepared, don’t spend enough time to ‘warm up’ to their interviewees, and don’t think of using other kinds of sources to back up the results of their questioning.

Most importantly, the idea of a pure ‘oral history’ as a special kind of history that can stand alone, apparently untouched by ‘non-oral history’, is historiographically questionable. Utilising the speaking voices of historical actors in just one of many methodologies available to historians of the near past, especially in these days, when actors’ voices take so many forms. Today’s actors don’t just talk, they also write articles and books, memoirs and emails, and present themselves in chatrooms and blogposts and a host of other online media. Contemporary history must be based on all these kinds of expressions, not just oral voices. So ‘oral history’ is just one complementary methodology in the contemporary historian’s toolbox, nothing else.

I came to think of this when I read the call for papers for the 2010 annual meeting of the Oral History Association, to be held on the theme ‘Times of Crisis, Times of Change: Human Stories on the Edge of Transformation’. The theme as such is highly relevant, also for historians of science, technology and medicine:

The economic, political and environmental tensions of the present moment are powerfully reshaping our world. People find themselves trapped within global forces, whether economic collapse, war and genocide, forced displacement and relocation, or the threat of environmental disaster. These forces often appear to act upon people in ways beyond their control. At the same time, moments of great crisis engender powerful new visions of change and transformation. Whether as involuntary subjects or active agents, leaders or witnesses, people live and embody these changes. Their memories are critical windows on human struggles, resilience, myth-making, and the political power of stories, forcing a reckoning with the past as well as a reconsideration of the future. Such stories speak to both collective and contested understandings of life on the edge of transformation.

A theme that gives rise to questions like: “How have people struggled and survived in times of crisis? How do people create change and bear witness to it? How do they construct their stories of these moments? In what ways have stories of crisis and change shaped public memories of pivotal historical eras? How do we reconcile contradictory stories of crisis and change?” (read the whole CFP here).

Excellent and very timely questions! But that said, why should historians of the contemporary world limit themselves to using ‘oral history’ methods to study these stories and memories? Why talk with people about these things with a voice-recording machine, when you have millions of written responses to the current political, economic and environmental crisis available on the internet? A single world news article on Huffington Post easily draws several thousands of comments, which bear witness to how people handle the present and the near past.

This fascinating cacaphony (or maybe symphony 🙂 of millions of daily public reactions — from the ultraright to the far left — to all kinds of current world affairs isn’t oral: it’s produced on keyboards, in writing. It’s a daily testimony to the fact that ‘online history’ and ‘social web history’ has become much more relevant for historians interested in the contemporary world than ‘oral history’ — which now seems to be a speciality on its way to insignificance.