questions
& comments
are welcome! email
mailing address:
Department of the
History of Science
Univ. of Oklahoma
601 Elm Avenue
Norman, OK 73019
tel: 405.325.3427 fax: 405.325.2363
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.
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
. . . perhaps the most important facts about people and about societies
have always been encoded within
the ordinary and the commonplace. —
george lipsitz
............................ themes at a glance
scientific
images the
contested nature of how "science" and "scientists"
are portrayed
childhood
& science at
play and at school, seeing science & society from a child's-eye
view
nature
& culture interpreting the world around, within, and beyond us
mechanical natures the
shifting landscapes of the human, the animal, and the technological
science
fiction
imagining
other worlds while wondering about our own pasts and futures
quotation:
George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American
Popular Culture (U of Minn Pr, 1990), p. 20.