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1. DOCU-CLIM: A global documentary climate dataset for climate reconstructions

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02303-y  

   Burgdorf, Angela-Maria; Brönnimann, Stefan; Adamson, George; Amano, Tatsuya; Aono, Yasuyuki; Barriopedro, David; Bullón, Teresa; Camenisch, Chantal; Camuffo, Dario; Daux, Valérie; et al (December 2023, Scientific Data)

   Abstract Documentary climate data describe evidence of past climate arising from predominantly written historical documents such as diaries, chronicles, newspapers, or logbooks. Over the past decades, historians and climatologists have generated numerous document-based time series of local and regional climates. However, a global dataset of documentary climate time series has never been compiled, and documentary data are rarely used in large-scale climate reconstructions. Here, we present the first global multi-variable collection of documentary climate records. The dataset DOCU-CLIM comprises 621 time series (both published and hitherto unpublished) providing information on historical variations in temperature, precipitation, and wind regime. The series are evaluated by formulating proxy forward models (i.e., predicting the documentary observations from climate fields) in an overlapping period. Results show strong correlations, particularly for the temperature-sensitive series. Correlations are somewhat lower for precipitation-sensitive series. Overall, we ascribe considerable potential to documentary records as climate data, especially in regions and seasons not well represented by early instrumental data and palaeoclimate proxies. 

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2. Climate indices in historical climate reconstructions: A global state-of-the-art.

   https://doi.org/doi.org/10.5194/cp-17-1273-2021  

   Nash, D. J. (January 2021, Climate of the past)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract. Narrative evidence contained within historical documents and inscriptions provides an important record of climate variability for periods prior to the onset of systematic meteorological data collection. A common approach used by historical climatologists to convert such qualitative information into continuous quantitative proxy data is through the generation of ordinal-scale climate indices. There is, however, considerable variability in the types of phenomena reconstructed using an index approach and the practice of index development in different parts of the world. This review, written by members of the PAGES (Past Global Changes) CRIAS working group – a collective of climate historians and historical climatologists researching Climate Reconstructions and Impacts from the Archives of Societies – provides the first global synthesis of the use of the index approach in climate reconstruction. We begin by summarising the range of studies that have used indices for climate reconstruction across six continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia) as well as the world’s oceans. We then outline the different methods by which indices are developed in each of these regions, including a discussion of the processes adopted to verify and calibrate index series, and the measures used to express confidence and uncertainty. We conclude with a series of recommendations to guide the development of future index-based climate reconstructions to maximise their effectiveness for use by climate modellers and in multiproxy climate reconstructions. 

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3. An island ‘endemic’ born out of hybridization between introduced lineages

   https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.16990  

   Salter, Jessie F.; Brumfield, Robb T.; Faircloth, Brant C. (May 2023, Molecular Ecology)

   Abstract Humans have profoundly impacted the distribution of plant and animal species over thousands of years. The most direct example of these effects is human‐mediated movement of individuals, either through translocation of individuals within their range or through the introduction of species to new habitats. While human involvement may be suspected in species with obvious range disjunctions, it can be difficult to detect natural versus human‐mediated dispersal events for populations at the edge of a species' range, and this uncertainty muddles how we understand the evolutionary history of populations and broad biogeographical patterns. Studies combining genetic data with archaeological, linguistic and historical evidence have confirmed prehistoric examples of human‐mediated dispersal; however, it is unclear whether these methods can disentangle recent dispersal events, such as species translocated by European colonizers during the past 500 years. We use genomic DNA from historical museum specimens and historical records to evaluate three hypotheses regarding the timing and origin of Northern Bobwhites (Colinus virginianus) in Cuba, whose status as an endemic or introduced population has long been debated. We discovered that bobwhites from southern Mexico arrived in Cuba between the 12th and 16th centuries, followed by the subsequent introduction of bobwhites from the southeastern USA to Cuba between the 18th and 20th centuries. These dates suggest the introduction of bobwhites to Cuba was human‐mediated and concomitant with Spanish colonial shipping routes between Veracruz, Mexico and Havana, Cuba during this period. Our results identify endemic Cuban bobwhites as a genetically distinct population born of hybridization between divergent, introduced lineages. 

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4. Introduction to Focus Section: Computational Perspectives in the History of Science

   Gibson, Abraham; Laubichler, Manfred; Maienschein, Jane (September 2019, Isis)

   Digital technologies have transformed both the historical record and the historical profession. This Focus section examines how computational methods have influenced, and will influence, the history of science. The essays discuss the new types of questions and narratives that computational methods enable, and the need for better data management in the HPS community. They showcase various methodological approaches, including textual and network analyses, and they place the computational turn in historiographical and societal context. Rather than surrender to technophilia or technophobia, the essays articulate both the benefits and the drawbacks of computational HPS. They agree that the future of the field depends on the successful integration of technological developments, social practices, and infrastructural support, and that historians of science must learn to embrace collaboration both within and beyond disciplinary boundaries. 

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5. Historians in the Laboratory: Reconstruction of Renaissance Art and Technology in the Making and Knowing Project

   Smith, Pamela H.; Researchers, Making and (January 2016, Art history)

   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. 

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