Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

For review: Paradata and Transparency in Virtual Heritage

2012-02-29T06:24:00.001-08:00

Now available for review: Paradata and Transparency in Virtual Heritage by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Hugh Denard and Drew Baker, King's College London, UK (Ashgate 2012). Please contact Julianne Nyhan directly if you are interested in reviewing this book and have relevant expertise.

ISR Reviewer spotlight: Toma Tasovac

2012-02-29T04:34:00.006-08:00

Toma Tasovac is currently reviewing for ISR e-Lexicography: The Internet, Digital Initiatives and Lexicography, edited by Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera and Henning Bergenholtz (Comtinuum, 2011)

ISBN: 9781441128065

Toma Tasovac is the director of the Belgrade Center for Digital Humanities (http://humanistika.org), and chief programmer and editor of Transpoetika: A Digital Platform for Serbian Language and Literature (http://transpoetika.org). He has degrees in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard and Comparative Literature from Princeton. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in Digital Arts and Humanities at Trinity College Dublin. His research interests include complex lexical architectures in eLexicography, retrodigitization of historic dictionaries, and integration of digital libraries and language resources. Toma is equally active in the field of new media education, regularly teaching seminars and workshops in Germany, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. He blogs at http://metapoetika.org and tweets as @ttasovac.

ISR Reviewer spotlight: Graham McBeath

2012-02-20T03:19:00.000-08:00

Graham McBeath is currently at work on a review of Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, edited by Bruce Clarke and Mark B.N. Hansen (Duke University Press: 2009). Graham is senior lecturer in Sociology and Media at the University of Northampton and has particular interests in the history and development of cybernetics. His review will be published in ISR later this year and a summary of it will be posted here too.

Lancashire's 'Forgetful Muses' available for review

2012-02-16T05:31:00.001-08:00

ISR has recently received a copy of Forgetful Muses: reading the author in the text by Ian Lancashire. Please contact Julianne Nyhan directly if you are able and willing to review this book and have expertise in this topic.

Explore the 2011 issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews!

2012-02-10T06:47:00.000-08:00

Explore the first 2011 issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews completely free of charge! We have made the first 2011 issue of each of our journals free to read on ingentaconnect - no sign up required!

Table of Contents

Enigma rebus: Prolegomena to an archaeology of algorithmic artefact, David Link

Schoenberg, serialism and cognition: Whose fault if No one listens?, Philip Ball

Interdisciplinarity as critical Inquiry: Visualizing the Art/Bioscience interface, Andrew S Yang

Socio-Cultural characteristics of usability of bioinformatics databases and tools, Conor Douglas; Rebecca Goulding; Lily Farris; Janet Atkinson-Grosjean

Placebo: no longer a phantom response, Charles Pasternak

ESSAY REVIEW: Excavating the Future: Taking an `Archaeological' approach to technology, James G R Cronin

Don't forget, you can also download two of the new 2012 "top articles" here:
http://www.maney.co.uk/top_articles/isr/

January 2012: available for review

2012-01-31T07:36:00.000-08:00

I recently received a copy of The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader edited by Sandra Harding and published by Duke University Press for review. Please contact Julianne Nyhan directly if you are interested in writing a review of it and it is in your area of expertise.

Quantifying Digital Humanities

2012-01-26T08:01:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

See the full article: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ucldh/6730021199/sizes/o/in/photostream/

Don't forget to check out Interdisciplinary Science Reviews online:
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/isr

NEW ISSUE: Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

2011-12-13T01:17:00.000-08:00

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews,Volume 36, Number 4, December 2011

Table of Contents
Editorial, Willard McCarty

Scientific Visualizations: Bridge-Building between the Sciences and the Humanities via Visual Analogy`Everything one invents is true' Gustave Flaubert, Mario Petrucci

The Microbial Stages of Humanity, Charles S Cockell

Environmental History within a Revitalized Integrative Research Methodology for Today and Tomorrow, Elize S van Eeden

Difficulties of the Re-Emergent Science — the Case of Astrobiology, Urszula K Czyz˙ ewska

When Natural met Social: A Review of Collaboration between the Natural and Social Sciences, Arnout R H Fischer, Hilde Tobi, Amber Ronteltap

Putting the Brain at the Heart of General Education in the Twenty-First Century: A Proposal, Steve Fuller

View the table of contents and read the free editorial online.

Guest review by James G.R. Cronin, University College Cork, Ireland.

2011-09-22T01:27:00.000-07:00

Review: HIDDEN HISTORIES: SYMPOSIUM ON METHODOLOGIES FOR THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE HUMANITIES, ca. 1949-1980, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON, 17 SEPTEMBER 2011 (Sponsored by HKFZ and UCLDH)

University College London's historic Main Building was the venue for ‘Hidden Histories’, a one day international symposium, held on Saturday 17 September 2011, to discuss methodologies for a history of computing in the humanities. Earlier this year, Julianne Nyhan and Anne Welsh of University College London's Department of Information Studies and Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), were awarded funding from the University of Trier’s Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Forschungszentrum (HKFZ) for a project entitled ‘Digital Humanities as Wissensraum: uncovering hidden histories (c. 1949-1980)’. The time scale chosen to frame this project is deeply significant for the history of humanities computing. In a canonical reading of its history this thirty year period covers the scope of Busa’s ‘Index Thomisticus’ project. Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit priest, who died aged 98 on 9 August 2011, is credited with pioneering hypertext and the application of computing to humanities research. In 1949 Busa had proposed a revolutionary idea to IBM: using computers to study texts, in particular the collected works of medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, a task which was to occupy Busa until 1980. In contrast to the established historical narrative the ‘Hidden Histories’ project seeks to uncover alternative histories, across this defining thirty year period, by sifting through the fragmentary evidence from activities of lesser-known pioneering and ‘early adopter’ practitioners and scholars in humanities computing.

At the project’s outset, in February 2011, Nyhan and Welsh, joint principal investigators, had announced their intention to host an international symposium in order to collegially discuss a diversity of approaches to methods underpinning such original and ambitious research. Invited delegates ranged across a veritable transdisciplinary spectrum: information science; computer studies; linguistic studies; historical studies; critical theory; and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Claudine Moulin (University of Trier), pried apart philosophical connotations of ‘Wissensraum’ (spaces of knowledge) for applications to humanities computing. Moulin encourages assembling a ‘typology’ of spatial forms to systematise relationships between the physicality of knowledge space and its knowledge ordering. This process places an emphasis on the centrality of user generation on the production and dissemination of content. Similarly, crowdsourcing makes use of the distributed information flow of the Web, but as Melissa Terras (UCLDH), cautioned, researchers need to ask the right questions if they expect to receive pertinent responses from the ‘hive mind’. In their respective papers, Edward Vanhoutte (Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, Ghent, Belgium) and Ray Siemens (University of Victoria, Canada, who presented virtually), discussed how explorations of the publication histories of humanities computing textbooks may help researchers to better understand the processes involved in shaping perceptions amongst scholars, educators, and the public from ‘Literary and Linguistic Computing’ through ‘Humanities Computing’ to ‘Digital Humanities’.

Is digital humanities a field or a discipline? In his opening keynote, Willard McCarty (Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London and Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney), reminded delegates that digital humanities is ‘imprinted’ with the memory of experiences from the humanities which, in turn, effects perceptions of chronology, narration, and interpretation. The Exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity (London 1968), often considered to be the first major exhibition of computer art, is now nearly forgotten yet it represents the rich seams of connection between the arts and sciences anticipating current interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.

‘Hidden Histories’ will employ oral testimony interpreted through narrative inquiry. Andrew Flinn (UCLDH) who spoke on oral history as a method in historical recovery called attention to the value of listening for the silences in personal stories as an amplification of lived experiences and as a means of shaping generative research questions. I advocated intentional alignment of critical theory to historical studies as an aid to peeling back discursive layers constructing canonical narratives.

The task of capturing processes through the gathering of ephemera was a theme threading through the entire symposium. Vanda Broughton (UCLDH) looked at the lost origins of information science through the nearly forgotten origins of the Classification Research Group, (CRG). Reiterating Flinn, she stressed that losses and lacunae in documentary records can only be fully enriched by experiences articulated through oral statements and witness testimonies. This salient point was stressed in the closing keynote presented by Lou Burnard (Emeritus, Oxford University Computing Services). The thirty year time scale framing the ‘Hidden Histories’ project was significantly underscored by technological transition from main frame to personal computing. Burnard reminded delegates that each phase of humanities computing was culturally mediated by own its technological capabilities. In knitting together an authentic historical critique, Burnard stressed, this determining factor needs due consideration and acknowledgment.

Busa’s life work sought to tease out generative research questions with the aid of computer technology. By systematically probing deeper into forgotten fragments ‘Hidden Histories’ seeks to impart an even more generative story.

This section of the ‘Hidden Histories’ project will run until December 2011.

For further information on the project please visit the project homepage http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/hiddenhistories/

Reviewed by James G.R. Cronin, University College Cork, Ireland

Hidden Histories symposium on computing in the Humanities

2011-09-15T04:15:00.000-07:00

ISR’s Editor-in-Chief and Book Reviews Editor are involved in a symposium entitled ‘HIDDEN HISTORIES: SYMPOSIUM ON METHODOLOGIES FOR THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE HUMANITIES c.1949-1980’, which will take place in UCL, on Saturday 17 September sponsored by HKFZ and UCLDH.

The symposium is being organised by Julianne Nyhan and Anne Welsh and is part of a research pilot that they have been undertaking on the history of computing in the Humanities. The application of computing to the Humanities is not new and can be traced back to at least 1949, when Fr Roberto Busa began researching the creation of an index variorum of some 11 million words of medieval Latin in the works of St Thomas Aquinas and related authors. Notes and contributions towards a history of the computer in the Humanities have appeared in recent years; however, our understanding of such developments remains incomplete and largely unwritten.

This project gathers and makes available sources to enable the social, intellectual and cultural conditions that shaped the early take up of computing in the Humanities to be investigated. The project draws on an interdisciplinary method bundle from Oral History, Digital Humanities and Historical-Cultural Studies. With the aim of capturing memories, observations and insights that are rarely recorded in the scholarly literature of the field it carries out interviews with ‘pioneer’ or ‘early adopter’ scholars and practitioners from c. 1949 until 1980 (that is, from main frame computing to the coming of the personal computer). These interviews will be published online in due course and Saturday’s symposium will bring Historians, Information Studies and Digital Humanities scholars together who have either been researching this area or who have expertise in methodologies that may allow new insights into such histories to be won.

Presentations include, in the following running order:

Opening Keynote: Beyond chronology and profession: discovering how to write a history of the Digital Humanities, Willard McCarty, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London; Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney.

Knowledge Spaces and Digital Humanities, Claudine Moulin, Universitaet Trier, Germany

Unwriting the history of Humanities Computing, Edward Vanhoutte, Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature – Ghent, Belgium

Crowd sourcing: beyond the traditional boundaries of academic history, Melissa Terras, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

Different stories to be lived and told: recovering Lehmann James Oppenheimer (1868-1916) for the narrative of the Irish Arts & Crafts movement (1894-1925), James G.R. Cronin, School of History & Centre for Adult Continuing Education, University College Cork, Ireland.

Oral History and acts of recovery: humanizing history?, Andrew Flinn, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

Lost origins of Information Science, Vanda Broughton, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

Plus ça change: a historical perspective on the institutional context of Digital Humanities, Claire Warwick, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

(Virtual presentation) DH pioneers and progeny: some reflections on generational accomplishment and engagement in the Digital Humanities, Ray Siemens, Faculty of Humanities, University of Victoria

Closing Keynote: Data vs. Text: forty years of confrontation, Lou Burnard, Oxford University Computing Services (Emeritus)

Discussion: towards an oral history of Computing in the Humanities, Chaired by Anne Welsh and Julianne Nyhan, Dept. Information Studies, UCL

Podcasts of some lectures will be posted online after the even - watch this space!

ISR 36.3

2011-09-14T10:05:00.000-07:00

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 36.3 (September 2011) has been published.
Steve Russ' article entitled 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences' is freely available and can be accessed here: http://bit.ly/nDrKFa

The table of contents is as follows:

1.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
Russ, Steve
209-213(5)

2.
The Vagueness of Wigner's Analysis
Gray, Jeremy
214-228(15)

3.
The Physical Origin of Physically Useful Mathematics
Lutzen, Jesper
229-243(15)

4.
Why the effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences is not surprising
Suppes, Patrick
244-254(11)

5.
Explaining the Applicability of Mathematics in Science
Baker, Alan
255-267(13)

6.
Reviews
Miller, Ian; Rehbein, Malte
268-272(5)

Relaunch of the ISR blog

2011-06-02T07:16:00.000-07:00

Since agreeing to relaunch the ISR blog I've been mulling over what to write, how to write it and who to write it for. When Willard McCarty made his first post in November of last year he reflected on what the ISR blog could be: “My guess is: an experiment to discover what the Editor of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews thinks about the journal as it is happening (thoughts mostly unknown, perhaps even to himself), and then whether these thoughts are of interest to readers” (see here).

Over the past few weeks I've been researching aspects of the history of letters and correspondence for an article that I'm writing for the forthcoming Digital Humanities in practice. Collections of essays such as Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400-1700, edited by Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond (Cambridge University Press: 2007), have given me some fascinating insights into the role of correspondence in early-modern Europe. In their introduction, Bethencourt and Egmond present a sketch of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637). Known as the 'General Attorney' of the republic of letters, they write that he corresponded with more than 500 persons, among them “princes, popes, cardinals, … bishops, … ambassadors, magistrates, scholars, librarians, secretaries, artists, writers, scientists, pharmacists, jewelers, merchants and clergymen” (p.2)”. His interests encompassed scientific and cultural areas, including astronomy, perfumery, literature and music. He chose (it seems) not to publish any of the 10,000 letters that we know he wrote during his lifetime but “[h]e knew that his letters were simultaneously private and public, confidential and open: they could be exchanged and read aloud in small groups, a common practice in the republic of letters” (p.3-4).

This overview of Peiresc has raised many interesting questions that have helped me to probe my understanding of what the relaunched ISR blog could be. Like Peiresc's letters, can a blog be simultaneously public and private? Of course the ISR blog is freely accessible to all. But how can we encourage readers to post their comments, so that responses to blog posts that might otherwise have been made in private or in private conversation with colleagues might be made public? Who will read this blog and can we build a readership as diverse as that of Peiresc? One might naturally expect this blog's audience to comprise the same people as those who read ISR. Yet, it seems that in many disciplines blogging, and the use of other social media such as twitter, is not the most prevalent or conventional means of scholarly communication. How might this influence the profile and distribution of people who might read and react to this blog?

In order to explore all of these questions a little more I've decided that the first aim of this blog is to be reflective. I'm going to reflect on the role, take-up, implications and impact of blogging and social media in interdisciplinary research. I also intend to take advantage of the fact that a blog is not an official scholarly publication, and so here we will have more scope to explore issues that may be of interest to readers, but do not tend to be explored in the journal proper. I'll begin by blogging about my experience of being the book reviews editor of ISR for the past two years, try to give some advice to young scholars who are planning to write book reviews and try to give some advice to more established scholars about the kinds of reviews we especially like to publish in ISR.

Finally, I'd like to make room for other voices apart from my own. Though topics such as the intersection of social media and interdisciplinary research communication may seem emblematic of our age, I'd also like to look back at the history of ISR and those who have helped to shape it since its first issue in 1976. Likely topics will be readers' favourite articles or reviews, and perhaps short pieces that analyse how the treatment of particular topics has changed in ISR over the past years (thanks to Anne Welsh for this idea). If you would like to contribute a piece to the blog please do let me know and please do post comments, suggestions and reactions to this initial plan of work!

the next thing

2010-12-09T06:37:00.000-08:00

One of the contributors to "History and human nature" asked me if I were not inclined to heave a sigh of relief at the completion of the issue. "Yes -- and no" was my answer: yes, because of course I wanted to see the result of such a great collaborative effort in print and wanted it to be out in the world; no, because the collaboration itself was, as I said earlier, one of the things that this scholar lives for. But I suppose that I'm no different than anyone else who takes pleasure in his work, which is to say, in the working.

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
9/12

A start

2010-11-04T02:09:00.000-07:00

"If Darwin were alive today, he clearly would have been an obsessive blogger." Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford 2009): 76.

Background

Although I have been corresponding online from before the time when NetNorth (Canada), Bitnet (US) and Janet (UK) became the Internet and before the Web became a household word, this is my first blog. Colleagues have said that I have been proto-blogging on the electronic seminar Humanist from its beginnings in 1987, but I don’t think they are paying close enough attention to the relationship of form to formed. A blog (fr. “weblog”, which suggests to me a blend of diary and ship’s log) is a different creature from the dominant mechanism of those days, a multiple-recipient e-mailer. A blog, I’d guess, has a more meditative, interior trajectory, an e-mailer a more conversational tendency. Even a tabula rasa remains a tabula.

So, what is this blog? My guess is: an experiment to discover what the Editor of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews thinks about the journal as it is happening (thoughts mostly unknown, perhaps even to himself), and then whether these thoughts are of interest to readers.

Why might they be? I think they might because ISR is at the forefront of attempts to realize, reflect on and give meaning to the qualities of genuinely interdisciplinary research across all the disciplines, especially between the sciences and the humanities. It is true that interdisciplinary research is as old as disciplines and that it has been promoted since the early 20th Century. But knowledge practices are slow to change and even slower to become objects of enquiry. When Anthony Michaelis founded ISR in 1976, he felt the need to enclose “interdisciplinary” in quotation marks, denoting almost a neologism. Now, more than 40 years later, claims of “interdisciplinarity” are rife, seemingly a condition of grant-getting and academic respectability. But I confess unease with the abstract noun and the pointless ontological argument it seems endlessly to generate. I think we need to know how interdisciplinary research is done, and done well, rather than what interdisciplinarity is. The Oxford English Dictionary helps in its discussion of the root-term by showing that discipline is fundamentally concerned “with practice or exercise” rather than with theory. So also its extension to interchange among disciplines.

Slowly ISR has expanded its scope from interchange among the natural sciences (Michaelis’ focus) to the humanities, arts and social sciences, where the refiguration of disciplinary thought that Clifford Geertz noticed in the early 1980s continues apace. But work beyond areas of narrow specialization is still largely unrewarded as well as poorly understood. For that reason ISR receives a lamentably meagre trickle of unsolicited submissions, enough to populate one issue every other year at best. Its function has rather proven to be best served through commissioned and mostly guest-edited issues, which are nevertheless rigorously peer-reviewed.

ISR 35.3-4: “History and human nature”

The forthcoming issue of ISR, “History and human nature”, splendidly illustrates the journal’s intentions and potential. As the brief introductory editorial explains, the issue grew out of Editorial Board member Brad Inwood’s suggestion to approach G. E. R. Lloyd for an essay along the lines of his recent book, Cognitive Variations (Oxford 2007), which we both admired, and to ask him to name co-contributors whose commentary he would most like to have. He eagerly agreed, naming a dozen and a half scholars from around the world. Almost all of them agreed. In turn we asked each contributor to name readers, thus greatly widening the circle of collaborators and disciplines. The width of that circle gives some indication of how magnanimous Lloyd’s treatment of his subject is.

My reaction? As a scholar I live for opportunities to work with such colleagues and to see such a result.

“History and human nature” is important to ISR’s long-term project in a number of respects. The distinction and attention it brings to the journal is of course most welcome. But far more important is advancing Lloyd’s argument on cognitive variation in humankind, with its implications for our understanding of what it might mean to be interdisciplinary – i.e., able to see what others see as they see it, to operate on it as they would and discuss it in terms they would recognize. In his opening contribution Lloyd refers to the effort as building “bridgeheads of intelligibility” – notably an ongoing process that does not presume a neutral standing point but works toward better (and badly needed) communication among disciplines. Some, most notably Stanley Fish, have argued that since perfect neutrality is impossible, the attempt is illegitimate. His would be the last word on the subject if the point were to be, rather than try to become, interdisciplinary. The authors of “History and human nature” show how exciting, even thrilling, and profoundly informative the striving is when done with such intelligence and care.

This issue is also important to ISR because it exemplifies scholarly collaboration and so gives genuine meaning to a “transcendental virtue” (Peter Galison’s term) against which the work of the caricatured “lone scholar” is nowadays unfavourably compared. The particular rhythm of conversation among scholars set by the medium of a printed journal and the reader’s imaginative participation at the pace it determines are, I think, exactly right for the interchange among disciplines that the journal exists to foster.