Download or read book Instruments Travel and Science written by Marie Noëlle Bourguet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-08-29 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are now accustomed to conceive of science as an instrumental activity, producing numbers, measurements and graphs by means of sophisticated devices. This book investigates the historical process that gave rise to this instrumental culture. The contributors trace the displacement of instruments across the globe, the spread of practices or precision and the circulation and appropriation of skills and knowledge. Through comparative and contextual approaches, the volume confronts the tension between the local and the global, examining the process of the universalization of science. Bringing together case studies ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, contributors discuss French, German and British initiatives, as well as the knowledge and techniques of travellers in countries such as India, Africa, South East Asia and the Americas. Students and researchers interested in the history of science in both Western and non-Western cultures will find this book a valuable and thought-provoking read.

Download or read book Geography Technology and Instruments of Exploration written by Fraser MacDonald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on aspects of the functioning of technology, and by looking at instruments and at instrumental performance, this book addresses the epistemological questions arising from examining the technological bases to geographical exploration and knowledge claims. Questions of geography and exploration and technology are addressed in historical and contemporary context and in different geographical locations and intellectual cultures. The collection brings together scholars in the history of geographical exploration, historians of science, historians of technology and, importantly, experts with curatorial responsibilities for, and museological expertise in, major instrument collections. Ranging in their focus from studies of astronomical practice to seismography, meteorological instruments and rockets, from radar to the hand-held barometer, the chapters of this book examine the ways in which instruments and questions of technology - too often overlooked hitherto - offer insight into the connections between geography and exploration.

Download or read book Instruments in Art and Science written by Helmar Schramm and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-08-29 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a collection of original papers at the intersection of philosophy, the history of science, cultural and theatrical studies. Based on a series of case studies on the 17th century, it contributes to an understanding of the role played by instruments at the interface of science and art. The papers pursue the hypothesis that the development and construction of instruments make a substantive contribution to the opening of new fields of knowledge, the development of new cultural practices, but also to the delineation of particular genres, methods, and disciplines. This perspective leads the authors to reflect anew on what actually defines an instrument and to develop a series of basic questions to determine what an instrument is - which actions does the instrument incorporate? – which actions does the instrument make possible? - when do the objects of examination themselves become instruments? – what skills are required to use an instrument, which skills does it produce? With its combination of new theoretical models and historical case studies, its detailed demonstration of the mutual influence of art and science with the instrument as the point of intersection, this volume enters new territory. It is of great value for all those interested in the history of our perception of instruments. Besides the editors, the authors of the papers are: Jörg Jochen Berns, Olaf Breidbach, Georges Didi-Huberman, Peter Galison, Sybille Krämer, Dieter Mersch, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, and Otto Sibum.

Download or read book A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century written by Cynthia Wall and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Concise Companion presents fresh perspectives on eighteenth-century literature. Contributes to current debates in the field on subjects such as the public sphere, travel and exploration, scientific rhetoric, gender and the book trade, and historical versus literary perceptions of life on London streets. Searches out connections between the remarkable number of new genres that appeared in the eighteenth century. Crosses conventional disciplinary lines. Demonstrates that philosophy, history, politics and social theory both influence and are influenced by literature.

Download or read book Higher and Colder written by Vanessa Heggie and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-08-02 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the long twentieth century, explorers went in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest, and highest points on the globe. Taking us from the Himalaya to Antarctica and beyond, Higher and Colder presents the first history of extreme physiology, the study of the human body at its physical limits. Each chapter explores a seminal question in the history of science, while also showing how the apparently exotic locations and experiments contributed to broader political and social shifts in twentieth-century scientific thinking. Unlike most books on modern biomedicine, Higher and Colder focuses on fieldwork, expeditions, and exploration, and in doing so provides a welcome alternative to laboratory-dominated accounts of the history of modern life sciences. Though centered on male-dominated practices—science and exploration—it recovers the stories of women’s contributions that were sometimes accidentally, and sometimes deliberately, erased. Engaging and provocative, this book is a history of the scientists and physiologists who face challenges that are physically demanding, frequently dangerous, and sometimes fatal, in the interest of advancing modern science and pushing the boundaries of human ability.

Download or read book The History of Cartography Volume 4 written by Matthew H. Edney and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 1803 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its launch in 1987, the History of Cartography series has garnered critical acclaim and sparked a new generation of interdisciplinary scholarship. Cartography in the European Enlightenment, the highly anticipated fourth volume, offers a comprehensive overview of the cartographic practices of Europeans, Russians, and the Ottomans, both at home and in overseas territories, from 1650 to 1800. The social and intellectual changes that swept Enlightenment Europe also transformed many of its mapmaking practices. A new emphasis on geometric principles gave rise to improved tools for measuring and mapping the world, even as large-scale cartographic projects became possible under the aegis of powerful states. Yet older mapping practices persisted: Enlightenment cartography encompassed a wide variety of processes for making, circulating, and using maps of different types. The volume’s more than four hundred encyclopedic articles explore the era’s mapping, covering topics both detailed—such as geodetic surveying, thematic mapping, and map collecting—and broad, such as women and cartography, cartography and the economy, and the art and design of maps. Copious bibliographical references and nearly one thousand full-color illustrations complement the detailed entries.

Download or read book The Language of Popular Science written by Olga A. Pilkington and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-12-28 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you read (or write) popular science, you might sometimes wonder: how do the authors manage to make subjects that once put you to sleep in science class both so entertaining and approachable? The use of language is key. Based on analyses of popular science bestsellers, this linguistic study shows how expert popularizers use the voices and narratives of scientists to engage readers, demonstrating the power of science and portraying researchers as champions of knowledge. By doing so they often blur the lines between nonfiction and fiction, inviting readers to take part in thought experiments and turn ordinary scientists into omnipotent heroes.

Download or read book Reinterpreting Exploration written by Dane Keith Kennedy and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2014 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploration was a central and perhaps defining aspect of the West's encounters with other peoples and lands. Rather than reproduce celebratory narratives of individual heroism and national glory, this volume focuses on exploration's instrumental role in shaping a European sense of exceptionalism and its iconic importance in defining the terms of cultural engagement with other peoples. In chapters offering broad geographic range, the contributors address many of the key themes of recent research on exploration, including exploration's contribution to European imperial expansion, Western scientific knowledge, Enlightenment ideas and practices, and metropolitan print culture. They reassess indigenous peoples' responses upon first contacts with European explorers, their involvement as intermediaries in the operations of expeditions, and the complications that their prior knowledge posed for European claims of discovery. Underscoring that exploration must be seen as a process of mediation between representation and reality, this book provides a fresh and accessible introduction to the ongoing reinterpretation of exploration's role in the making of the modern world.

Download or read book Science and Empire in the Atlantic World written by James Delbourgo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science and Empire in the Atlantic World is the first book in the growing field of Atlantic Studies to examine the production of scientific knowledge in the Atlantic world from a comparative and international perspective. Rather than focusing on a specific scientific field or single national context, this collection captures the multiplicity of practices, people, languages, and agendas that characterized the traffic in knowledge around the Atlantic world, linking this knowledge to the social processes fundamental to colonialism, such as travel, trade, ethnography, and slavery.

Download or read book The SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge written by John A Agnew and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2011-02-17 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A refreshingly innovative approach to charting geographical knowledge. A wide range of authors trace the social construction and contestation of geographical ideas through the sites of their production and their relational geographies of engagement. This creative and comprehensive book offers an extremely valuable tool to professionals and students alike. - Victoria Lawson, University of Washington "A Handbook that recasts geograph′s history in original, thought-provoking ways. Eschewing the usual chronological march through leading figures and big ideas, it looks at geography against the backdrop of the places and institutional contexts where it has been produced, and the social-cum-intellectual currents underlying some of its most important concepts." - Alexander B. Murphy, University of Oregon The SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge is a critical inquiry into how geography as a field of knowledge has been produced, re-produced, and re-imagined. It comprises three sections on geographical orientations, geography′s venues, and critical geographical concepts and controversies. The first provides an overview of the genealogy of "geography". The second highlights the types of spatial settings and locations in which geographical knowledge has been produced. The third focuses on venues of primary importance in the historical geography of geographical thought. Orientations includes chapters on: Geography - the Genealogy of a Term; Geography′s Narratives and Intellectual History Geography′s Venues includes chapters on: Field; Laboratory; Observatory; Archive; Centre of Calculation; Mission Station; Battlefield; Museum; Public Sphere; Subaltern Space; Financial Space; Art Studio; Botanical/Zoological Gardens; Learned Societies Critical concepts and controversies - includes chapters on: Environmental Determinism; Region; Place; Nature and Culture; Development; Conservation; Geopolitics; Landscape; Time; Cycle of Erosion; Time; Gender; Race/Ethnicity; Social Class; Spatial Analysis; Glaciation; Ice Ages; Map; Climate Change; Urban/Rural. Comprehensive without claiming to be encyclopedic, textured and nuanced, this Handbook will be a key resource for all researchers with an interest in the pasts, presents and futures of geography.

Download or read book Public Understanding of Science written by David Knight and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-10-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Download or read book The Global Social Sciences written by Michael Kuhn and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The European social sciences tend to absorb criticism of their approach and re-label it as a part of what the critique opposes; thus criticism of European social sciences by subaltern social sciences, their 'talking back,' has become a frequent line of reflection. The relabeling of the critique of the European approach as a critique from ‘Southern’ social sciences of ‘Western’ social sciences has in effect turned ‘Southern’ as well as ‘Western’ social sciences into competing contributors to the same ‘globalizing’ social sciences. Both are no longer arguing about the European approach to social sciences but about which social thought from which part of the globe should prevail. If the critique becomes a part of what it opposes, one might conclude that the European social sciences are very adaptable and capable of learning. One might, however, also raise the question whether there is anything wrong with the criticism of the European social sciences, or, for that matter, whether there is anything wrong with the European social sciences themselves. The contributions in this book discuss these questions from different angles: They revisit the mainstream critique of the European social sciences, and they suggest new arguments criticizing social science theories that may be found as often in the ‘Western’ as in the ‘Southern’ discourse.

Download or read book The Atlantic World in the Antipodes written by Kate Fullagar and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays stems from a John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures. Held over two years, the seminar investigated the effects and transformations of ideas, peoples, and institutions from the Atlantic World when carried into the Antipodes. The papers presented in this volume distil some of the key themes to emerge from discussion, each demonstrating the complexity with which discourses and practices operated in the Indo-Pacific oceanic region. Some had unexpected effects, others underwent profound transformation. Always they were changed by the ideas, peoples, and institutions of the Antipodes. Combined, the chapters underscore the ways in which both oceanic worlds were co-produced through a variety of intellectual and practical interactions over the modern period. Essays by leading Pacific scholars such as Margaret Jolly, Anita Herle, and Katerina Teaiwa are joined by essays from key scholars of various regions in the Atlantic World such as Simon Schaffer, Iain McCalman, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Michael McDonnell, as well as interventions by the new transnationalist breed of Australian historians, led by Alison Bashford and Ann Curthoys.

Download or read book The Voyage of Thought written by Michael Wintroub and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Voyage of Thought is a micro-historical and cross-disciplinary analysis of the texts and contexts that informed the remarkable journey of the French ship captain, merchant, and poet, Jean Parmentier, from Dieppe to Sumatra in 1529. In tracing the itinerary of this voyage, Michael Wintroub examines an early attempt by the French to challenge Spanish and Portuguese oceanic hegemony and to carve out an empire in the Indies. He investigates the commercial, cultural, and religious lives of provincial humanists, including their relationship to the classical authorities they revered, the literary culture they cultivated, the techniques of oceanic navigation they pioneered, and the distant peoples with whom they came into contact. Ideal for graduate students and scholars, this journey into the history of science describes the manifold and often contradictory genealogies of the modern in the early modern world.

Download or read book Fields of Expertise written by Christelle Rabier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-19 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The primacy of experts and expertise in current fields of public policy, governance and non-governmental organizations has accompanied increasing confusion on the foundations of their practices and the adequacy of their methods. Fields of Expertise clarifies the complex heritage of experts by exploring their relationship with legal, political and administrative powers from a comparative historical and interdisciplinary perspective. Specifically, the authors offer case studies on expert procedures in the two capital cities of Paris and London since 1600 in the essential areas of risk management, medical procedures, economic policy, and administrative reform. In doing so, they provide insight into the evolution of expert procedures while at the same time taking into consideration the interdisciplinary nature of scholarship on expertise drawn from Sociology, Science Studies and Political Science. The following articles thus challenge traditional views on the nature of expertise and provide a synthesis of the vast and disparate literature that has been written on the subject. Fields of Expertise’s international perspectives and multi-disciplinary grasp of the literature in political science, sociology, science studies and history will be useful to scholars and students alike in addressing this highly topical issue. The essays reference mainstream sources and widely-documented cases on experts and expertise, making it accessible to the general reader as well.

Download or read book The First Scientific American written by Joyce Chaplin and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2007-08-02 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famous, fascinating Benjamin Franklin -- he would be neither without his accomplishments in science. Joyce Chaplin's authoritative biography considers all of Franklin's work in the sciences, showing how, during the rise and fall of the first British empire, science became central to public culture and therefore to Franklin's success. Having demonstrated in his earliest experiments and observations that he could master nature, Franklin showed the world that he was uniquely suited to solve problems in every realm. In the famous adage, Franklin "snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from the tyrants" -- in that order. The famous kite and other experiments with electricity were only part of Franklin's accomplishments. He charted the Gulf Stream, made important observations on meteorology, and used the burgeoning science of "political arithmetic" to make unprecedented statements about America's power. Even as he stepped onto the world stage as an illustrious statesman and diplomat in the years leading up to the American Revolution, his fascination with nature was unrelenting. Franklin was the first American whose "genius" for science qualified him as a genius in political affairs. It is only through understanding Franklin's full engagement with the sciences that we can understand this great Founding Father and the world he shaped.

Download or read book Classical Genetic Research and Its Legacy written by Benoit Godin and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governments and researchers from industrial countries have been measuring science and technology for more than seventy years. This book provides an historical examination of official science and technology statistics and indicators in Western countries and addresses the following questions: What were the main historical moments that led to the development of statistics on science and technology? What were the main socio-political stakes behind the activities of science measurement? What were the philosophical and ideological conceptions that drove measurement? What statistics and indicators were developed and how were they constructed? The first part of the book concentrates on the construction and development of science and technology statistics from 1930 to the present, the principles at work, and the vested interests and forces behind that construction. The second part analyzes to what uses statistics were put, and with how much confidence actors used statistics to document their case or to promote their political agenda.