Science blogging has been on the Nature Group‘s radar screen for quite a while. On Saturday 30 August Nature Network organizes the ‘Science Blogging 2008’ meeting in London to promote the genre — especially among scientists and science educators:

What can science bloggers do to maximise their impact? Can blogging contribute to scientific research and careers? How can blogs be used to help educate the public about science? What other emerging online tools will play a role in science?

The day starts with a keynote by physician/journalist Ben Goldacre (who writes The Guardian’s weekly Bad Science column), followed by a panel about “how science blogs can change the public’s perception of scientists and provide a support framework for scientists themselves”. The rest of the day is devoted to breakout sessions: 1) Can blogging unlock your creativity?, 2) How to make friendfeeds and influence people, 3) How to enhance your blog?, 4) Science in Second Life: a virtual tour, 5) Science blogs and online forums as teaching tools, and 6) Communicating Primary Research Publicly.

Read more here.

Relations between curators and museum management, between museums and their owners, and between museums and sponsors/donors come in all varieties. Sometimes they can be quite troubled—one of the best known cases is perhaps the censored Enola Gay exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum in the 1990s.

The Smithsonian apparently has a perennial problem. In an article in the Newsletter of the Organizaton of American Historians (nr 36, August 2008) titled ‘History with Boundaries: How Donors Shape Museum Exhibits’, the current president of the OAH, Pete Daniel, tells the sad story about how sponsors and donors together with the top management have curbed curatorial control over exhibitions in the National Museum of American History. The museum, says Daniel, “could dare to present exciting and controversial interpretations based on recent scholarship”, but instead it “has settled for donor-demanded exhibits, ignored recent scholarship, marginalized curators, and now strives for mediocrity”. Read more here.

(thanks to Jim Edmonson for the tip)

The Hunterian Museum in London is looking for an assistant curator to develop the cataloguing and storage of its big odontological reserve collection. Successful candidates are supposed to have “a good working knowledge of primate anatomy and taxonomy, and the motivation and enthusiasm to realise the potential of a world-class research collection” + a relevant degree + some previous experience of working with collections. The pay is pretty limited (£20,000 pa), and it’s only an 18 month contract, but it’s nevertheless a good starting point for someone who wants to have a career in medical or natural history history collections. More info on the Hunterian Museum website. Closing date is 15 September.

(via Simon Chaplin)

More results of playing with Wordle: here are the 221 members of the History of Biomedical Research Interest Group (BRHIG) gathered for a ‘group picture’:

A nice touch is that Wordle incidentally uses its one and only institutional member (because it has such a long name) as a ‘rope’ from which the rest of the group hangs. And please note that it’s Wordle that situates me right in the middle, below a lila coloured Carsten Timmermann.

If you want an enlarged and printable cloud, click this image:

And if you want to construct similar images from other digitalised membership directories, note that it took approx. one (!) hour for the data to travel forth and back between my computer and Wordle’s server to transform BRHIG’s membership list into a cloud! Okay, I could do other things simultaneously, but it’s not a rapid thing to do.

I should add that the BRHIG is open to everyone interested in the history of biomedical research:

In addition to the presentation and discussion of work-in-progress, the group will serve as a forum for discussion of issues of common interest, such as the identification and development of source materials; the uses and pitfalls of oral histories in research; and collaborations between historians and the biomedical community.

Register as a member here.

The registration is now open for the ‘University museums and community’ conference in Manchester, 16-20 September. The meeting is organised by ICOM’s International Committee on University Museums and Collections (UMAC) and the registration fee is reasonable low. So this is a good opportunity to meet others engaged in university museums. This year’s topic is important because our kind of museums have to find a way to balance on the one hand our identity as university museums with international research ambitions and on the other hand our identity as university museums that cater for local and regional community interests. Hopefully some of the presentations will address this problem. See program and other details here: http://www.meeting.co.uk/confercare/umac2008.

(thanks to Cornelia Weber)

Here’s the audience gathering for the session on ‘The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0’ organised by Gustav Holmberg for the 10th Public Communication of Science and Technology conference (PCST-10) held in Malmö a month ago (read more on our joint session blog).

And here’s my own paper for the event (responses are welcome, it needs a lot of improvement and re-writing before it can go to publication):

Abstract:
Within a few years, science blogging has emerged as a new genre for science communication. But is science blogging really best understood in terms of ’science’ and ‘the public’? Or does the phenomenon of science blogging suggest other dichotomies? This paper argues that ’science communication’ is better conceptualized 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 ’scientific field’ entail two different domains of communication practices which correspond, roughly, to the cultures of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’, respectively.

And here’s the talk:

1. Those of you who have followed the field of science communication over the last decade have seen how earlier approaches to public understanding of science — usually based on what is often called the ‘deficit model’ — have repeatedly been challenged by demands for more participatory (dialogic, two-way, etc.) models for science communication.

2. In spite of these attempts to foster more participatory modes of engagement, however, the traditional one-way public understanding of science through institutionalized mass media, such as newspapers and magazines, radio and television, museums, etc., still constitutes the ruling paradigm, both in communication practice and in communication studies. Even the internet and web-based science communication is more often than not used for institutionalized one-way communication — a kind of digital broad-casting. More dialogic practices are still a largely utopian vision.

3. However, the possibility for developing more dialogic science communication practices has become much more realistic with the recent emergence of the participatory web, i.e., web platforms and services that aim to enhance user-driven content, easy and informal information sharing, and collaboration among users. Podcasting, image and movie content sharing services like Flickr and YouTube, social networking services like Facebook, wikis like Wikipedia, and not least blogging provide the means for a new flourishing of dialogic science communication.

4. In other words,  Read More

If you happen to be based in UK or Ireland you can now apply for one of Wellcome Trust’s Arts Awards — which are given to organisations or individuals for projects that engage the public with biomedical science through the arts.

The general idea behind the scheme is that the Trust believes that art is a great mediator for the public engagement with science in general and with biomedicine in particular:

Visual art, music, moving image, creative writing and performance can reach new audiences which may not traditionally be interested in science and provide new ways of thinking about the social, cultural and ethical issues around contemporary science. Collaborative and interdisciplinary practice across the arts and sciences can help to provide new perspectives on both fields. The arts can also provide imaginative ways of engaging and educating young people in the field of science.

Thus the scheme aims to:

• stimulate interest and debate about biomedical science through the arts
• examine the social, cultural and ethical impact of biomedical science
• support formal and informal learning
• encourage new ways of thinking
• encourage interdisciplinary practice and collaborative partnerships in arts, science or education practice.

All art forms are covered by the programme, i.e. “dance, drama, performance arts, visual arts, music, film, craft, photography, creative writing or digital media”. People from a wide range of professinal backgrounds are eligible for awards, including artists, scientists, curators, filmmakers, writers, producers, directors, academics, science communicators, teachers, arts workers and education officers, and so forth. The only restriction is that the applicant and the activity must be based in UK or Ireland. Deadline is 10 October 2008 — see more one the scheme’s webpage: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/Funding/Public-engagement/Grants/Arts-Awards

How to handle human remains is a key issue for us and for other (medical) museums (see earlier post here, here, here and here). Last February, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris organised a series of round-table discussions about the ethics of collecting and displaying human remains. Now the full text of the discussions have been published (in French and English) — see here.

(thanks to Haidy L. Geismar, Material World, for the tip)

In an earlier post, I summarized the fascinating autobiographical story behind Harvard biotech professor David Edwards’s new experimental institution, Le Laboratoire in Paris. In his recent book Artscience (Harvard University Press 2008), Edwards tells about his education, how he was swamped with money after a short but succesful career as a biotech inventor, and how he was decent enough to use it for good and visionary purposes.

‘Le Lab’ makes a lot of sense from the perspective of his own life narrative. But Edwards has the ambition to raise above the particularities of his own personal trajectory, to make a more general argument for what he calls ‘artscience’, i.e., the fusion of aesthetic and scientific methods. He wants to foster ‘idea translation’, i.e., to bring innovative ideas between academic disciplines, and across academia, the corporate world, and cultural and social institutions; he wants to break down the ubiquitous organisational and institutional barriers to creativity and innovation. ‘Idea translators’ are people who happen to be ‘curious’ and above all have the ‘passion’ to traverse cultural barriers. And ‘artscience’, in Edwards’s view, ‘holds a special key to succesful, sustained idea translation’, because ‘art-science barriers are among the most intractable of obstacles in human organizations of all kinds’ (p.172).

One of Edward’s points is a variation of the old science studies theme (popularized by, among others, Bruno Latour), namely that ‘science in the making’ (the construction of science) is very different from ‘ready-made science’ (which we read about in journal articles and textbooks). For example, there is a lot of art and science in museums (and sometimes ‘art AND science’ which museums have good reasons for bringing inside their walls). But museums usually only tell the story of ready-made art and ready-made science (and ready-made ‘art AND science’), and rarely give their visitors insights into the creative processes behind art and science. Thus the ‘laboratory’ shall explicitly not be a museum.

Le Laboratoire in the 1er arrondissement in Paris is the first instance of such an artscience laboratory (see earlier post here). It is supposed to become a site where ideas can be translated, where they can ‘accelerate’ and transcend barriers. In Le Lab the public is invited to experience the creative process that drives innovation as a fusion of art production and science production. Experiments by leading international artists in collaboration with leading international scientists are supposed to catalyze changes in cultural institutions, in industry, in educational institutions and in society as a whole. And more generally, by experimenting with the art-science relations in such specially designed artscience laboratories, we will somehow learn in practice how to break down the general institutional barriers that block creativity and innovations.

Read More

A couple of days ago I tried to make a cloud of eDrugSearch‘s latest list of health and medicine blogs. But since I couldn’t make Wordle process all 883 blog names on the list into one single display, I abbreviated the run to the top 100 blog names (see the result here).

Wordle doesn’t explictly say there is a size limit, however. So I ran the list again and — lo and behold — after 90 minutes heavy traffic between my Thinkpad and Wordle’s server (it takes time because it’s a phrase cloud and not a word cloud), this image of all 883 health and medicine blogs on eDrugSearch’s list gradually emerged on my screen:

Cannot find yourself in it? Well then either you’re not a visible health-and-medicine-blog — or you just need new glasses. Or click on this image (if it doesn’t open properly you have to update your Java version to make it work):

Such a huge cloud isn’t very useful, of course, it’s mainly for the fun of it. Again, here’s the list of blogs that went into the image above: Read More