We
are pleased to inform you that the last London PUS Seminar of this academic
year will be taking place on Wednesday 20 June 2018 at 4.15pm in Room QUE328 at LSE (map here http://www.lse.ac.uk/mapsAndDirections/home.aspx). Dr Mathew Paskins, LSE, will give
a talk titled “About TIME: reading
science journalism in 20th century mass market newsmagazines.”. Further
details and an abstract are below.
As usual,
all are welcome and there is no need to book a place. We hope to see you on 20 June.
Best wishes
Jane Gregory, Martin
Bauer, Simon Lock, Melanie Smallman
London PUS Seminar
4.15pm Wednesday 20th June
2018
Room QUE328, LSE
Dr Matthew Paskins, LSE
About TIME: reading science
journalism in 20th century mass market newsmagazines.
Between
its first issue in 1923 and the end of the twentieth century, TIME magazine
devoted some nine million words to coverage of science, technology, and
medicine. What happens if we try to read them now? It turns out that some of
the frameworks through which we conventionally think about science
journalism in the twentieth century are severely tested by the particularities
of past scientific coverage, in the form of episodes and details from the past
ranging from the worldwide outbreak of parrot fever to Henry Ford's
puzzling chemical endeavours. Because the historical archive of
popular science is not quite what we imagine it to be, we can use it
to think critically about some aspects of public understanding of science
in the present. This talk spells out some of ways of doing that, drawing
on close readings of particular stories and corpus analysis techniques of
thousands of others. It also compares TIME's distinctive styles of science
journalism with those of some of its obvious and less obvious competitors.
