STS Seminar Series 2010-11
Term 2
All seminars take place at 5pm in room G.03, Department of Science and
Technology Studies, 22 Gordon Square (main UCL Campus)
Monday 17 January
Staffan Mueller-Wille and Isabelle Charmantier, University of Exeter
Rewriting the System of Nature. Linnaeus's Use of Writing Technologies
In this seminar we want to present results from a Wellcome Trust funded
research project studying the ways in which Carl Linnaeus assembled,
filed, and cross-referenced information about plants and their medicinal
virtues. It is a well-known fact that Linnaeus was one of the first to
write about a "natural system" of plants and to suggest that plants of
the same "natural order" share similar pharmaceutical properties. His
manuscripts, held at the Linnean Society (London) and various
institutions in Sweden, provide an excellent opportunity to understand
how information processing practices determine such ideas. They document
how Linnaeus experimented with a variety of paper-based information
technologies throughout his career -- including commonplace- and
notebooks, maps, schematic diagrams and drawings, collections of loose
paper sheets, sometimes folded up to form slim files, annotations in
interleafed copies of Linnaeus’s own publications, and paper-slips
resembling index cards. His "natural system" emerged not out of direct
observation of nature, but out of Linnaeus’s day-to-day work of revising
and rearranging what he and others had written earlier.
Forthcoming Seminars:
Monday 31 January
Katy Price, University of East Anglia
Dreaming the Future: J.W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time
Monday 7 February
Georgina Voss, Honorary Research Associate, STS - UCL
Hacking the Home
Monday 21 February
Paul Merchant and Thomas Lean, British Library
TBA
Monday 14 March
Nancy Anderson, SUNY Buffalo/Research Associate STS-UCL
"We Said Magnified 254,000,000X, Not 150,000,000": Linus Pauling,
Molecular Models, and the Problem of Scale
Monday 28 March
Frederick Attenborough, Loughborough University
‘Sci-candy’ and the ‘femme fatale of physics’: The media, gender and the
‘sexy scientist’
Monday 11 April
Steve Miller, Science and Technology Studies UCL
TBA
--
Dr. Chiara Ambrosio
Teaching Fellow in Philosophy of Science
Department of Science and Technology Studies
University College London
Tel. (office) +44 02076791324
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/fellows/ambrosio/index.htm
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