Title: Historians in the Laboratory: Reconstruction of Renaissance Art and Technology in the Making and Knowing Project
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European scholars began to search for a new kind of knowledge, what Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in 1620 would call a ‘New Philosophy; or Active Science’ (The Great Instauration, 1620), and what we have come to see as the beginnings of the modern natural sciences. These scholars sought to engage with the things of nature, in addition to the words of texts, and, as they looked about for models of this new kind of enquiry, they took up the case history used by their medical colleagues. They also looked to the methods of history, for history involved gathering observations and experiences about the human world, just as the new type of investigation these scholars sought would observe and collect experiences of the natural realm. They began to call what they did ‘natural history’. These scholars also looked to the handwork of craftspeople and their ability to manipulate natural materials in order to produce valuable products. Where these newly self-described ‘natural historians’ and ‘experimental philosophers’ could read the texts of their medical and historian colleagues, they generally had no such familiar entry point into handwork, for craftspeople produced things, and only rarely recorded their work in words and texts that the scholars could read. As Francis Bacon complained in the Novum Organum, ‘experience is illiterate’. Of course, craftspeople were not illiterate, but were fluent, rather, in a different kind of language and knowledge, one that posed problems for sixteenth-century scholars, and continues to make life difficult for the historians who study them. In the following essay, we suggest that one means for overcoming this problem is to bring historians and natural scientists back into conversation with each other, as they were in the sixteenth century when exploration of the human world provided a model for the just emerging study of the natural realm. Between 1400 and 1700, European craftspeople similarly found words to be inadequate: they paradoxically declared in writing that writing was inadequate to convey their skills, and that book learning was inferior to bodily experience. more »« less
The anthropologist and acclaimed essayist, Loren Eiseley, in the midst of recounting a vision in the conclusion of a draft of a 1960 composition, “Creativity and Modern Science,” invoked Charles Darwin as the essay’s animating spirit. Eiseley modified his draft the next year and published it in no less than three of his subsequent books. The most striking differences between his draft and published texts is the substitution of Darwin in the final moments of the narrative with Francis Bacon, a barrister and philosopher who died nearly two centuries before the famous biologist was born. Here, is crafted a rationale for this unlikely switch, to the extent that the intent of another can be uncovered, by closely reading Eiseley’s psychologically charged work. Eiseley’s own struggles as both a scientist and an artist, identities respectively epitomized by Darwin and Bacon, reveal how and why the writer permitted his foremost heroes to be substituted, one for the other.
Calabrese Barton, Angela(
, American Education Research Association)
Autumn, a young white woman growing up in multi-generational poverty in an economically challenged midwestern city, has authored a STEM-empowered life against the dominant sociohistorical narrative in American society. She has attended public schools that served significant populations living in high poverty – overcrowded classrooms, high teacher turnovers, out-of-field teaching, and limited STEM resources. Yet, she has authored herself into STEM despite these mitigating circumstances.
Autumn is currently a high school senior with aspirations to become an engineer or a hairdresser working in an eco-salon. She spends part of her time after school in a makerspace housed in her local community center, building things to solve other people’s problems. She reminds us that her out-of-school efforts to participate in STEM exist worlds away from schooling. However, she takes the optimistic view that if she could tell teachers about her out-of-school STEM experiences, her teachers might be better able to help her and her peers serve the interests and needs of her community, as well as see Autumn’s potential in STEM.
Now a rising 12th grader, we have followed Autumn since 5th grade through school and afterschool. As she grew older, she became more interested in helping us to document and tell her story. She is an author on this paper. Also during this time, Autumn has shifted from wanting to be a hair designer (5th grade) to wanting to own a “green” (environmentally friendly) hair salon (8th grade), to considering engineering as a possible career (10th grade). Autumn has struggled with being labeled “a girl in the background” and someone whom her mother described in 7th grade as “if she would just get Ds, I would be happy.” However, over the past 6 years, Autumn has engaged in an ever-increasing range of STEM-rich actions and relationships, including building a Little Free STEM Library, leading workshops on energy efficiency, making educational movies for her community to teach about green energy, and writing for her afterschool STEM club blog. We are interested in Autumn’s engagement with others in these activities over time and space, and how they shape her own and her community’s engagement in STEM.
The overarching question that guides this manuscript is: What are the micro-dynamics that produce and challenge inequalities in Fall’s becoming in STEM, as a white girl, growing up in multi-generational poverty in a Midwestern city.
Using Holland & Lave’s (2009) two forms of history –“history in person” and “history in institutionalized struggles”–we examined several pivotal events, and the micro-dynamics at play, identified by Autumn with respect to becoming in STEM. We sought to make sense of the ways in which Autumn’s STEM experiences were carried out in local practice but also enacted against the broader background of cultural/historical narratives. In this process we traced Autumn’s core commitments-in-practice in STEM & Community. We also examined how these core commitments-in-practice led, at times, to conflict and new forms of “contentious local practice” (LCP) as these commitments-in-practice pushed back against particular local, historical and sociocultural contexts.
Calabrese Barton, A.(
, American Education Research Association)
Autumn, a young white woman growing up in multi-generational poverty in an economically challenged midwestern city, has authored a STEM-empowered life against the dominant sociohistorical narrative in American society. She has attended public schools that served significant populations living in high poverty – overcrowded classrooms, high teacher turnovers, out-of-field teaching, and limited STEM resources. Yet, she has authored herself into STEM despite these mitigating circumstances.
Autumn is currently a high school senior with aspirations to become an engineer or a hairdresser working in an eco-salon. She spends part of her time after school in a makerspace housed in her local community center, building things to solve other people’s problems. She reminds us that her out-of-school efforts to participate in STEM exist worlds away from schooling. However, she takes the optimistic view that if she could tell teachers about her out-of-school STEM experiences, her teachers might be better able to help her and her peers serve the interests and needs of her community, as well as see Autumn’s potential in STEM.
Now a rising 12th grader, we have followed Autumn since 5th grade through school and afterschool. As she grew older, she became more interested in helping us to document and tell her story. She is an author on this paper. Also during this time, Autumn has shifted from wanting to be a hair designer (5th grade) to wanting to own a “green” (environmentally friendly) hair salon (8th grade), to considering engineering as a possible career (10th grade). Autumn has struggled with being labeled “a girl in the background” and someone whom her mother described in 7th grade as “if she would just get Ds, I would be happy.” However, over the past 6 years, Autumn has engaged in an ever-increasing range of STEM-rich actions and relationships, including building a Little Free STEM Library, leading workshops on energy efficiency, making educational movies for her community to teach about green energy, and writing for her afterschool STEM club blog. We are interested in Autumn’s engagement with others in these activities over time and space, and how they shape her own and her community’s engagement in STEM.
The overarching question that guides this manuscript is: What are the interactional forces that operating across space and time that influence Autumn’s becoming in STEM, as a white girl, growing up in multi-generational poverty in a Midwestern city.
Using Holland & Lave’s (2009) two forms of history –“history in person” and “history in institutionalized struggles”–we examined several pivotal events, and the micro-dynamics at play, identified by Autumn with respect to becoming in STEM. We sought to make sense of the ways in which Autumn’s STEM experiences were carried out in local practice but also enacted against the broader background of cultural/historical narratives. In this process we traced Autumn’s core commitments-in-practice in STEM & Community. We also examined how these core commitments-in-practice led, at times, to conflict and new forms of “contentious local practice” (LCP) as these commitments-in-practice pushed back against particular local, historical and sociocultural contexts.
Anson, Ian G; Moskovitz, Cary; Anson, Chris M(
, The journal of writing analytics)
Background: Text recycling (hereafter TR)—the reuse of one’s own textual materials from one document in a new document—is a common but hotly debated and unsettled practice in many academic disciplines, especially in the context of peer-reviewed journal articles. Although several analytic systems have been used to determine replication of text—for example, for purposes of
identifying plagiarism—they do not offer an optimal way to compare documents to determine the nature and extent of TR in order to study and theorize this as a practice in different disciplines. In this article, we first describe TR as a common phenomenon in academic publishing, then explore the challenges associated with trying to study the nature and extent of TR within STEM disciplines. We then describe in detail the complex processes we used to create a system for identifying TR across large corpora of texts, and the sentence-level string-distance lexical methods used to refine and test the system (White & Joy, 2004). The purpose of creating such a system is to identify legitimate cases of TR across large corpora of academic texts in different fields of study, allowing meaningful cross-disciplinary comparisons in future analyses of published work. The findings from such investigations will extend and refine our understanding of discourse practices in academic and scientific settings.
Literature Review: Text-analytic methods have been widely developed and implemented to identify reused textual materials for detecting plagiarism, and there is considerable literature on such methods. (Instead of taking up space detailing this literature, we point readers to several recent reviews: Gupta, 2016; Hiremath & Otari, 2014; and Meuschke & Gipp, 2013). Such methods
include fingerprinting, term occurrence analysis, citation analysis (identifying similarity in references and citations), and stylometry (statistically comparing authors’ writing styles; see Meuschke & Gipp, 2013). Although TR occurs in a wide range of situations, recent debate has focused on recycling from one published research paper to another—particularly in STEM fields (see, for example, Andreescu, 2013; Bouville, 2008; Bretag & Mahmud, 2009; Roig, 2008; Scanlon, 2007). An important step in better understanding the practice is seeing how authors actually recycle material in their published work. Standard methods for detecting plagiarism are not directly suitable for this task, as the objective is not to determine the presence or absence of reuse itself, but to study the types and patterns of reuse, including materials that are syntactically but not substantively distinct—such as “patchwriting” (Howard, 1999). In the present account of our efforts to create a text-analytic system for determining TR, we take a conventional alphabetic approach to text, in part because we did not aim at this stage of our project to analyze non-discursive
text such as images or other media. However, although the project adheres to conventional definitions of text, with a focus on lexical replication, we also subscribe to context-sensitive approaches to text production. The results of applying the system to large corpora of published texts can potentially reveal varieties in the practice of TR as a function of different discourse communities and disciplines. Writers’ decisions within what appear to be canonical genres are contingent, based on adherence to or deviation from existing rules and procedures if and when these actually exist. Our goal is to create a system for analyzing TR in groups of texts produced by the same authors in order to determine the nature and extent of TR, especially across disciplinary areas, without judgment of scholars’ use of the practice.
Abstract With the efflorescence of palaeoscientific approaches to the past, historians have been confronted with a wealth of new evidence on both human and natural phenomena, from human disease and migration through to landscape change and climate. These new data require a rewriting of our narratives of the past, questioning what constitutes an authoritative historical source and who is entitled to recount history to contemporary societies. Humanities-based historical inquiry must embrace this new evidence, but to do so historians need to engage with it in a critical manner, just as they engage critically with textual and material sources. This article highlights the most vital methodological issues, ranging from the spatiotemporal scales and heterogeneity of the new evidence to the new roles attributed to quantitative methods and the place of scientific data in narrative construction. It considers areas of study where the palaeosciences have “intruded” into fields and subjects previously reserved for historians, especially socioeconomic, climate, and environmental history. The authors argue that active engagement with new approaches is urgently needed if historians want to contribute to our evolving understanding of the challenges of the Anthropocene.
Smith, Pamela H., and Researchers, Making and. Historians in the Laboratory: Reconstruction of Renaissance Art and Technology in the Making and Knowing Project. Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10059812. Art history 39.2
Smith, Pamela H., & Researchers, Making and. Historians in the Laboratory: Reconstruction of Renaissance Art and Technology in the Making and Knowing Project. Art history, 39 (2). Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10059812.
Smith, Pamela H., and Researchers, Making and.
"Historians in the Laboratory: Reconstruction of Renaissance Art and Technology in the Making and Knowing Project". Art history 39 (2). Country unknown/Code not available. https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10059812.
@article{osti_10059812,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {Historians in the Laboratory: Reconstruction of Renaissance Art and Technology in the Making and Knowing Project},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10059812},
abstractNote = {In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European scholars began to search for a new kind of knowledge, what Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in 1620 would call a ‘New Philosophy; or Active Science’ (The Great Instauration, 1620), and what we have come to see as the beginnings of the modern natural sciences. These scholars sought to engage with the things of nature, in addition to the words of texts, and, as they looked about for models of this new kind of enquiry, they took up the case history used by their medical colleagues. They also looked to the methods of history, for history involved gathering observations and experiences about the human world, just as the new type of investigation these scholars sought would observe and collect experiences of the natural realm. They began to call what they did ‘natural history’. These scholars also looked to the handwork of craftspeople and their ability to manipulate natural materials in order to produce valuable products. Where these newly self-described ‘natural historians’ and ‘experimental philosophers’ could read the texts of their medical and historian colleagues, they generally had no such familiar entry point into handwork, for craftspeople produced things, and only rarely recorded their work in words and texts that the scholars could read. As Francis Bacon complained in the Novum Organum, ‘experience is illiterate’. Of course, craftspeople were not illiterate, but were fluent, rather, in a different kind of language and knowledge, one that posed problems for sixteenth-century scholars, and continues to make life difficult for the historians who study them. In the following essay, we suggest that one means for overcoming this problem is to bring historians and natural scientists back into conversation with each other, as they were in the sixteenth century when exploration of the human world provided a model for the just emerging study of the natural realm. Between 1400 and 1700, European craftspeople similarly found words to be inadequate: they paradoxically declared in writing that writing was inadequate to convey their skills, and that book learning was inferior to bodily experience.},
journal = {Art history},
volume = {39},
number = {2},
author = {Smith, Pamela H. and Researchers, Making and},
}
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