intro: the scipop webfolio

Most of the time, we take the commonplace, everyday world of science and popular culture for granted. But what might happen if we took those past and present experiences more seriously? First off, we'd have to find a place where thinking about Victorian zoetropes and Japanese monster movies and Newton's apple and Einstein's hair and marching penguins and maurauding Martians and chess-playing automata and Disney's "World of Tomorow" and singing whales and the Loch Ness monster and spaceship Earth and Pluto the planet that is no longer a planet makes sense. Here, through the scipop webfolio, we'll try to do exactly that: understand science in the vernacular.

the commonplace as consequential
The next step is to recognize how little historians of science know about these kinds of cultural experiences, because of the lingering suspicion that they're "sideshows" to what really matters: the world of professional science. But it is long past time to rethink that viewpoint, and to explore what popular culture can tell us about the meanings and consequences of the search for scientific knowledge. We'll be considering the commonplace as consequential, deserving of the best analytical skills and investigative imaginations that we can bring to bear on the everyday world.

an experiment in public history
You'll find that this webfolio is part archive, and part research lab…part scrapbook, and part study guide…part explanation, investigation, and conversation. As a digital workspace it offers possibilities that can't be found within a classroom's walls alone or the confines of a scholar's study. Scipop is a contribution to a whole range of new experiments in thinking about why we do history, who we do it for and who we do it with, what the process of historical inquiry looks like, and where it is that doing history takes place. This webfolio takes the idea of history as a public matter seriously, and is designed to capture the multi-dimensionality of what can happen when history is more than merely academic: when it is public history.

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okay, but what is a webfolio?

on how to spin a web:
"Take a deep breath! Now climb to the highest place you can get to. Now make an attachment with your spinnerets, hurl yourself into space, and let out a dragline as you go down!"
      — e.b. white, charlotte's web

folio:
(from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary): 3: c: a book of the largest size