Histories of Science

Mining event histories: a social science perspective

We explore how recent data mining-based tools developed in domains such as biomedicine or text mining for extracting interesting knowledge from sequence data could be applied to personal life course data. We focus on two types of approaches: ‘survival’ trees that attempt to partition the data into homogeneous groups regarding their survival characteristics, i.e., the duration until a given even...

Sketching together the modern histories of science, technology, and medicine.

This essay explores ways to "write together" the awkwardly jointed histories of "science" and "me dicine"--but it also includes other "arts" (in the old sense) and technologies. It draws especially on the historiography of medicine, but I try to use terms that are applicable across all of science, technology, and medicine (STM). I stress the variety of knowledges and practices in play at any ti...

Entangled histories: Climate science and nuclear weapons research

Climate science and nuclear weapons testing have a long and surprisingly intimate relationship. The global networks that monitored the Fukushima radiation plume and forecasted its movement are the direct descendants of systems and computer models developed to trace fallout from weapons tests. Tracing radioactive carbon as it cycles through the atmosphere, the oceans, and the biosphere has been ...

Computer Science at Kent Näıve tools for studying compilation histories

Transparent interaction ; dynamic generation : context histories for shared science

Scientists who do in silico or computer-based experiments use general purpose computer tools, like Web browsers and word processors to carry out their tasks. As such, they have no formal file management support for collecting, coordinating, annotating and reflecting on their digital experimental traces. In this presentation we look at how we are exploring the use of implicit context histories t...