Dansk kunstlivs enfant terrible, Uwe Max Jensen — som laver kunst bl.a. ved at pisse skulpturer af — er pissesur på dagbladet Politiken fordi en af deres kunstanmeldere brugte så meget onlinesværte på ENDO-ECTO:

I Nordjyske i går skriver UMJ, at ENDO-ECTO har “kastet hele 10 (ti!) artikler af sig i Politiken (i den skrevne avis og på nettet)”. Det er sådan set OK, synes UMJ, som også finder ENDO-ECTO “interessant og spektakulær” — men, og nu kommer det store men — “Politikens ekstreme fokus på Phillip Warnell’s tarmkunst afslører en ganske tydelig diskrepans i Politikens forhold til kunst, der berører det anale tema”.

UMJ minder om, at han allerede i juli 2007 placerede en lort på byggegrunden af kunstmuseet Heart i Herning. Men medens Politiken altså har givet Phillip Warnell optimal opmærksomhed, så har avisen valgt fuldstændig at fortie tilstedeværelsen af UMJ’s lorteværk i Herning:

Dermed gør Politiken sig skyldig i at forskelsbehandle danske og udenlandske kunstnere, der arbejder med anale tematikker. Det skyldes sandsynligvis, at avisen på provinsiel maner snobber for det internationale.

UMJ har bare misforstået en ikke helt uvæsentlig ting. ENDO-ECTO handlede ikke om lort og anal kunst. Dels er det pågældende pillekamera designet til at affotografere tolvfinger-, tynd- og tyktarmen — men ikke de rektale dele af fordøjelsesapparatet — og dels kom kameraet under seancen her på Medicinsk Museion ikke længere ned i Phillip end til mavesækken. Så UMJ’s status som Danmarks ledende analkunstner forbliver uanfægtet.

Yuwei Lin and Christian Greiffenhagen are planning to organise a panel on ‘video methodologies and STS’ at next year’s EASST (European Association for the Study of Science and Technology) meeting in Trento (September 2-4, 2010), and want to know if others are interested.

As they rightly point out, despite the rapid technical developments and a general turn to the visual in the social sciences, “video methodologies are still not widely used within STS, and most researchers continue to rely on ‘traditional’ ethnographic or other qualitative research methods using other means, such as talk or writing.

However, video technologies clearly offer exciting possibilities of capturing the dynamics and complexities in the field. Video constitutes a new form of evidence that can be exploited by researchers. Not only can it be used for the purposes of observation and documenting, video can also be used for ‘action research’ as a research tool through which field participants could represent their experiences through new media production and exchange (e.g., de Block and Sefton-Green 2004). When applied in STS, video helps to understand the complexities and multi-modalities in scientific and/or technical development and implementation processes more fully.

Would everyone agree with these arguments? What are the challenges of applying video-based methods in STS-like research (e.g., nuisances of using video technologies, field workers’ informed consent, interaction with the field workers, ethics of publishing video data)? How have video-based methods been applied in different types of research? What are the implications of video-based methods to STS research? Is it possible to capture ‘where the action is’ on video, or is scientific and technological work too distributed, both spatially and temporally, to allow such capture?

Interesting initiative! Anyone who would like to get involved in the panel should contact Yuwei (yuwei@ylin.org) before 5 October.

The other day photographer Mads Ljungdahl visited us — and took this romantic picture in one of our reconstructed early 20th century dentist’s clinics (it’s the building of the High Court of Eastern Denmark in the background):

(credit: Mads Ljungdahl, http://www.madsljungdahl.dk and  http://www.artreview.com/profile/Mads_Lj)

A couple of months ago I advertised David Pantalony’s forthcoming article on the colour green in medicine. Just want to add that it was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal last week (Sept 15, pp. 402-03). Read the full online text here.

A couple of weeks ago, I noted with some innocent pleasure that this humble blog was listed among the 100 Best Blogs and Websites for Innovative Academics. Pretty nice, I thought!

Then it turned out we’re also selected for the 100 Best Curator and Museum Blogs. Pretty nice too, I thought!

A couple of days ago, a service called The Daily Reviewer told us we’ve been selected for their Top Museum Blogs list. But now I’m not so innocent any more. Here’s their message:

Congratulations! Your readers have submitted and voted for your blog at The Daily Reviewer. We compiled an exclusive list of the Top 100 museums Blogs, and we are glad to let you know that your blog was included!

It’s the same kind of rhetoric you recognise from spam mails. The introductory “Congratulations!” tells it all. You can also acquire an ugly little yellowish badge to put on your site. Classical vanity fair methodology.

I mean, they probably don’t list blogs with Technorati authority below a certain point; they probably take advantage of blogs with a certain readership and utilise our vanity to sell advertisements. Parasites on our egos.

The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh is announcing a job as heritage manager. The succesful incumbent shall lead a team of professional staff and will be responsible for the operation and development of the College’s museums and library including collections, exhibitions, archives, members’ services and the College’s historic buildings. Closing date is 2 October. More info here.

Three months ago, Nature Biotechnology (27: 514-18, 2009) published a commentary titled ‘Science Communication reconsidered’, a topic we are of course very interested in here at MedMus.

I believe the commentary is still worth a comment, because it was written by 24 (sic!) more or less well known ‘experts’ in science communication, including Matt (“framing science”) Nisbett.

The co-authored commentary — which is based on a workshop on the changing nature of science communication “focusing specifically on biotech, biomedicine and genetics” held in Washington D.C. earlier this year — describes the state of science communication in general and in the printed news media in particular, and then ends with some recommendations for how to make the situation better.

The recommendations are peculiar for at least two reasons:

First, I’m surprised that none of the 24 authors seem to have noticed the importance of science, technology and medical museums for today’s science communication arena. True, many STM museums still have their focus on science, technology and medicine of the past, but more and more museums both in Europa and North America are increasingly identifying themselves as venues for science communication.

This total lack of mention of museums is all the more surprising because the 24 authors have a pronounced trust in government-sponsored science communication. In fact, they are wedded to a mixture of old mass media, newspaper journalism and a mid-20th century understanding of government-induced democracy.

The authors believe that the alleged threat to science journalism posed by corporate science media is thus best met by increasing funding of university- and government-supported science journalism.

Accordingly they don’t have much trust in science blogging. It’s mentioned in passing, but otherwise they believe blogging is “unlikely to become an effective solution” to what they perceive as a crisis in science communication.

Well, apparently the 24 authors are not entirely up-to-date with today’s media situation. Not only has grassroot blogging (both blogs by scientists and blogs by non-scientists about science) proved to be enormously vigorous. It is also much more likely to provide a democratic balance to corporate science newsrooms.

Why this nostalgic cry for an old-style public media and gvmt-sponsored science communication policy? Part of the explanation may lie in the  professional backgrounds of the 24 authors. Despite their focus on ‘biotech, biomedicine and genetics’, surprisingly many of them are affiliated with schools, departments and centres of public and community health.

My general impression is that scholars of public health tend to be more bound to have faith in goverment-sponsored health campaigns and less bound to trust bottom-up citizen health initiatives. Also that the basic rationale for much public and community health is a tendency to support government solutions for health policy issues.

If so, this co-authored plaidoyer for enhancing science communication is just classical public health communication policy writ large. I doubt a group of writers from departments of medical engineering would come up with similar recommendations for science communication. And Medgadget would probably find the commentary outrageous.

A couple of weeks ago I proposed a significant-medical-objects game — a sort of crowdsourcing/museum 2.0 procedure for the acquisition of objects for medical museums.

Turns out there is a website called, yes, Significant Objects, which has a host of exciting writers attached. The site’s objective is different from my little game. It’s based on the books Buying In (2008) and Taking Things Seriously (2007), in which Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn examined the ways in which we invest inanimate objects with significance.

With the Significant Objects site they have set up an curating experiment in which the ‘significance’ of objects bought in thrift stores and similar places are ‘artificially cooked up under controlled conditions’.

Sort of great idea — but in my mind real stories about real objects is more more interesting than ‘artificially cooked-up’ stories. Fiction is terribly overrated.

Some of you may remember Jim Edmonson’s talk here in Copenhagen three years ago about the plans for a new exhibition at the Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, on the history of contraception.

Jim/Dittrick eventually secured funding for it. So tomorrow the new exhibit — ‘Virtue, Vice, and Contraband: A History of Contraception in America’ — opens, at last. Examining 200 years of the history of contraception in the US, it depicts the social and cultural climate that influenced birth control decisions.

The major strength of the exhibition is the vast collection of contraception devices, like the cervical caps above and many others, donated to Case in 2005 by Percy Skuy. Over the course of forty years, Mr. Skuy had amassed the world’s largest collections of such devices.

Judged from the pics I’ve seen, the exhibit design seems pretty traditional. But that is more than compensated for by the richness of the material and the historical and political importance of displaying such artefacts. Hopefully, Case will not become nervous if the anti-abortionist religious right begins to make noises. It would be absurd, but so much in US university politics today is absurd, like Yale University Press’ recent decision to censor a book about the Danish Muhammed drawings.

By the way, here are some devices for vaginal douching (courtesy Jim Edmonson and Laura Travis):

2009 is the 100th anniversary of the notion of pH, proposed by the Danish chemist S.P.L. Sørensen.

Shortly after having been appointed head of the Chemical Department at the Carlsberg Laboratory in 1901, Sørensen started an extensive research programme on amino acids and proteins. One of his projects was the kinetics of enzyme dissociation; among other things, he found out that the degree of dissociation is dependent not only on temperature but also on hydrogen ion activity.

Summing up his enzyme investigations in 1909, Sørensen proposed the first logarithmic scale for hydrogen ion activity (pH) which is still in use: 0 is very acidic, 14 is very basic, and 7 is neutral (distilled water). The letter ‘H’ obviously stands for ‘Hydrogen’, but historians are still discussing what Sørensen meant by the letter ‘p’. Does it stand for ‘power’, ‘potential’, ‘Potenz’, etc., or is it just a arbitrary chosen letter?

Whatever, it was probably less arbitrary than this logo created by the Department of Chemistry, Technical University of Denmark.

Sørensen also developed a practical colourimetric method for determining pH. Using buffer systems covering the whole pH scale, he was able to produce reference solutions of known pH, and by applying a series of organic substances that shift colour depending on acidity, the pH of an unknown solution could be determined. Generations of students have used colour indicators for acid-base titration in school and in their university courses. Indicators on paper strips for rapid pH measurement are ubiquitous.

Today, pH is determined by a probe (a thin-walled glass bulb), which produces a small voltage that can be measured electronically. The first commercially successful electronic pH meter based on potentiometric principles was constructed in 1934 by the American chemist Arnold Beckman, who later founded Beckman Instruments (now Beckman Coulter). A few years later the Copenhagen company Radiometer put an electronic pH meter on the market.

(adopted from Medical Museion’s latest exhibition, ‘Primary Substances’)
(image from the Department of Chemistry, Technical University of Denmark)