Welcome...
Editor's blog
ISR is a quarterly journal that aims to set contemporary and historical developments in the sciences and technology into their wider social and cultural context and to illuminate their interrelations with the humanities and arts. It seeks out contributions that measure up to the highest excellence in scholarship but that also speak to an audience of intelligent non-specialists. It actively explores the differing trajectories of the disciplines and practices in its purview, to clarify what each is attempting to do in its own terms, so that constructive dialogue across them is strengthened. It focuses whenever possible on conceptual bridge-building and collaborative research that nevertheless respect disciplinary variation. ISR features thematic issues on broad topics attractive across the disciplines and publishes special issues derived from wide-ranging interdisciplinary colloquia and conferences.
Thursday, 9 December 2010
the next thing
In fact even before the project had begun I was looking ahead to future issues, as a journal editor must, and several weeks before "History and human nature" drew to a close I was working steadily more and more on the next issue, and ever more intensively planning those scheduled to come after it. (Forthcoming issues are listed on the website, www.isr-journal.org, including a very exciting project with the novelist A. S. Byatt.)
This next is issue is not quite fully assembled. With one article still awaiting review ISR 36.1 contains the following:
1. David Link, "Enigma rebus: Prolegomena to an archaeology of algorithmic artefacts", which the author describes as preliminary thoughts towards the definition of a necessary novel discipline, the archaeology of algorithmic artefacts" (emphasis mine). He enlists "the little creature 'Odradek' invented by Kafka [to serve] as an emblem for the enigmatic state of artefacts before they become and after they have been effective".
2. Charles Pasternak, "Placebo: no longer a phantom response", a review of recent clinical studies that "have revealed several neural pathways that are activated during the response of patients to a placebo. This", he argues, "lends credence to the view that placebos have a genuine role to play in clinical medicine." He proposes "that mechanisms similar to those that cause a placebo response may underlie the beneficial effects of religious belief and other neural stimuli."
3. Philip Ball, "Schoenberg, serialism and cognition: Whose fault if no one listens", presents clues from the science of music cognition to explain why atonal compositions based on the twelve-tone scale devised by Schoenberg remain unpopular. "Schoenberg's method of atonal composition", he argues, actively undermines some of the basic cognitive principles that allow our brains to turn notes into music."
4. Andrew Yang, "Interdisciplinarity as critical inquiry: Visualizing the art/bioscience interface", begins with the significant epistemological, cultural and ethical costs of the social boundaries maintained by disciplines. Taking the biosciences as his example he asks how non-specialists participate in crucial scientific decision-making in such a complex situation. His response is to consider the engagement of contemporary art and design with biology, hence Bioart.
5. Conor Douglas, Rebecca Goulding, Lily Farris and Janet Atkinson-Grosjean, "Socio-cultural characteristics of usability of bioinformatics databases and tools". These characteristics the authors take to be the norms, attitudes and beliefs that mediate the interactions between the structures and institutions of science. They focus on accessibility (the socio-cultural factors that make resources open and available for use), utility (perceived usefulness, affected potentially by non-technical matters such as trust and taste) and portability (social aspects of factors that allow a tool to move through space and time).
There will also be a few book reviews. The issue will be published in March.
WM
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