Ragesoss 2.02

"Where to people find the time?" for Wikipedia

2008-04-29T23:09:00.003+01:00

Clay Shirky gives a 15-minute talk on how participatory media might be changing society in a way analogous to the Industrial Revolution. Worth watching.

Wiki FM

2008-04-27T18:04:00.005+01:00

I've been using Wiki FM lately, a simple mashup of Last.fm and Wikipedia. (Thanks goes to Florence Devouard, who pointed this site out on the English Wikipedia mailing list.)

In addition to discovering new music (and rediscovering music I haven't listened to in a long time), I've been filling in gaps in Wikipedia's music photography. There are many band and musician articles that either don't have photos or are using non-free promo shots, while Flickr has freely-licensed photos that could be used. And for many others, there are fan-made photos that Flickrites would release under a free license if asked. It's a nice way to work on some of Wikipedia's image problems without it feeling like drudge work.

The Paranoid Style in American Science

2008-04-20T23:54:00.005+01:00

Slate has a very interesting three-part article by Daniel Engber: The Paranoid Style in American Science. Engber begins with a discussion of agnostic and sometime intelligent design proponent David Berlinski's new book critiquing the "New Atheists"; Berlinski, explains Engber, is a archetypical embodiment of a recent trend in American culture of turning the scientific virtue of skepticism against science itself. Engber argues that the same approach, exploiting the limits the scientific knowledge and the evidentiary shortcomings that often accompany even the most complete scientific consensuses, is part of an unhealthy trend, what the defenders of science on Wikipedia call "pseudoskepticism".

Pseudoskeptics -- many of them with clear political, commercial or ideological agendas -- sow doubt about human-caused climate change and suspected carcinogens, focus on the unproven safety of nonorganic food and GMO crops, and of course, point to gaps in evolutionary explanations to make room for religious ideas.

As Engber concludes, "Immoderate doubt is paranoia." He sees the trend of immoderate doubt as a parallel to what historian Richard Hofstadter famously called "the paranoid style in American politics" in his 1964 essay by that title. (Famously, at least, among Americanist graduate students.)

I agree with Engber's final conclusion, that "Immoderate doubt is paranoia." However, I don't think the trend of increasing skepticism about scientific matters indicates the rise of a "paranoid style", where society as a whole is moving toward immoderate doubt. Rather, it seems that people in general (and scientists themselves no less than nonscientists) are increasingly skeptical because they have a better understanding of the way science works and the social limitations of science on the large scale of modern research.

If the distribution skepticism in society is some sort of bell curve (not an unreasonable assumption), then the center of the distribution is moving closer to a point of healthy moderate skepticism, away from an overly credulous point (when it comes to science, among other things) where it has been in the past. The result of this is a dramatic increase in the number of people at the "immoderate doubt" end of the distribution, but the reduction of the other extreme more than makes up for it.

As an argument to retreat from the cliffs of untempered skepticism, Engber points to Simon and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air Pump to the effect that despite the Royal Society's motto of Nullius in verba (on no man's word), "the first society members were just as dedicated to the notion that organized science engenders trust, and that it requires the acceptance of some degree of doubt." But Simon and Schaffer famously conclude that "Hobbes was right", that "Knowledge, as much as the state, is the product of human actions." (Famously, at least, among history of science graduate students.) As that matter of fact about the way knowledge is generated increasingly becomes ingrained in American culture, it's only natural that the political and scientific discourse will increasingly overlap. We can't take the politics out of science, so the only way to overcome the problem of "paranoid style" science is to fix American politics.

The Future of Wikipedia (my take), part 2

2008-04-01T03:38:00.000+01:00

In my last post, I proposed some major changes to Wikipedia, such as liberalized inclusion standards, increased emphasis on news and the incorporation of social networking and casual discussion features. The aim of these ideas is to broaden the editor base to keep the unreachable goal of "the sum of all human knowledge" in sight.

In the long run, I think Wikinews has as much, if not more, of an important role to play in Wikimedia information ecosystem... especially with the shrinking ranks of professional journalists that will only shrink more as print newspapers circle the drain.

The centerpiece of my ideas for getting Wikinews Original Reporting to critical mass is to hire a professional newsroom manager to point Wikimedians in the right direction. Aside from the fact that Wikinews is a different site, with different policies and a different vibe, the main thing that stops more Wikipedians from doing Original Reporting is that they don't know what to report on. Professional journalists are given specific assignments; newsrooms have robust systems for identifying potentially newsworthy events and dispatching local reporters ahead of time.

Wikinews could take advantage of Wikipedia's location-based sitenotice (which lets logged-in users know about Wikipedia events such as meetups in their area) to inform potential reporters of upcoming viable reporting topics nearby. The newsroom manager would use the same kinds of information systems as traditional newsrooms to pinpoint news in progress or likely upcoming news events, and create a constant stream of local notices to attract reporters from the among the editing community.

The main problem, which many Wikipedians are familiar with, is that volunteer resources are not easily transferred. One of the perennial arguments that comes up when well-intentioned editors try to crack down on "cruft" and seemingly trivial Wikipedia content is that all that time editors spend writing about local bands and arcane fiction plot details could be better spent working on articles that matter. Editors who have been around longer just smile; it doesn't work that way. For the most part, people only contribute in areas they are interested in. However, local news is one area that has a natural interest community... and one that is easy to single out, based on IP location.

Of course, the biggest potential strength of Wikinews (and the strongest area of original coverage now, aside from interviews) is not location-limited: internet news. Coverage of Scientology and Project Chanology is a case in point. Many Wikimedians are actually more competent than professional journalists to understand and investigate online happenings and stories related to internet culture. This is an area of coverage that I think will expand naturally once Wikinews reaches critical mass (the point where large numbers of users visit Wikinews regularly just to see what is there, because, like with the main newspapers or the professional blogs, they can always count on new and interesting content, much of which isn't found elsewhere). There is enormous scope for tech and digital entertainment news, investigative journalism and human-interest news based on online communities, and this kind of content could take off once Wikinews reaches a certain level of confidence as not just a project that reports the news, but a project that makes the news in the same way traditional media does.

--------

My suggestion in the last post of increasing news coverage on Wikipedia, and eliminating all but Original Reporting from Wikinews, drew some fire from Jason Safoutin (DragonFire1024): "Wikipedia is NOT news and the quicker they realize that the better." Part of my response is that Wikipedia can be whatever the community and the Foundation want it to be. But I should clarify; what I propose would more along the lines of a merger of the non-original reporting of Wikinews with Wikipedia. It would still be acceptable (as it is now on Wikinews) to cover local news events of primarily local interest, and ways of sorting and organizing news coverage could be implemented. The main difference would be that news coverage on Wikipedia never reaches a certified (and protected) final published form.

Another Wikinewsie, Steven Fruitsmaak, noted that "community reporting is not something that sets Wikinews apart: look at Indymedia, OhMyNews, NowPublic, ... Wikinews can bring NPOV and collaborative editing to grassroots journalism." This is an important point. Right now, there several other citizens journalism sites; citizen journalism sets Wikinews apart from mainstream media, while the Neutral Point of View policy sets Wikinews apart from other community reporting websites and the increasingly sophisticated amateur and professional blogosphere. Nevertheless, I think the market is still wide open for a citizen journalism project that has both the independence and interactivity of new media and something approaching the breadth, volume and neutrality of traditional media (i.e., something like a thriving Wikinews).

--------

In my next post, I discuss some possible ways to attract more subject-matter experts (e.g., academics), who so far have been reticent contribute.

The Future of Wikipedia (my take), part 1

2008-03-28T03:56:00.001Z

The future of Wikipedia is a perennial topic of discussion among Wikipedians and Wikipedia critics. It's a topic I've been thinking about for a while (see my prognostications from early 2007). I apologize in advance for a long post.

It seems like Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation are finally turning the corner in several long-anticipated respects. The two long-heralded software projects, Unified Login and Stable Versions, are functional and moving toward implementation. The professionalization of the Foundation is starting to pay dividends: in the last few days, Executive Director Sue Gardner announced a $3 million, 3-year grant from the Sloan Foundation, followed a few days later by a $500,000 grant from philanthropists Vinod and Neeru Khosla.

Financial stability, and even financial flexibility, may be on the horizon, and the harshest critiques that could potentially derail the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia (in particular, those of Larry Sanger and the recent, ongoing accusations by Danny Wool and Kelly Martin) seem to have spent most of their energy without much effect. That's not to say that these critiques are entirely unfounded, but it's becoming clear that the worst of them are either in the past or not of project-killing significance. So it's a good time to reassess the big issues that will shape the project's future.

The title and main topic of the newest Wikipedia Weekly podcast is The Future of Wikipedia. The discussion (the "feeback" and "Wii moment" sections, from 21:47 to about 52:52) is primarily about the future growth of Wikipedia; Andrew Lih and Liam Wyatt disagreed in the last podcast about how big we can expect Wikipedia to be in the years to come.

Andrew forcefully states an idea that parallels my own thoughts on Wikipedia's future: to come anywhere close to "the sum of all human knowledge", the project needs a "Wii moment", a reformulation of what it means to contribute to Wikipedia (along the lines of what the Wii did for gaming) that opens things up to huge numbers of people who never would have participated so before. The podcast discusses some of the basic things that will make editing more accessible: what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing, and a gentler culture that is more appealing to people with little patience for revert wars and wikilawyering.

I have a more expansive vision of what Wikipedia and its sister projects ought to become. In this and some follow-up posts, I'll lay out some of my ideas for major changes.

One of the most promising avenues for expanding the scope of the Wiki(p/m)edia community is news. Right now, Wikipedia has a troubled relationship to the news. One recent example: Obama's race speech, "A More Perfect Union", was undergoing a deletion discussion from the evening of March 18 (the day the speech was made and the article was written) until yesterday. In the meantime, the article got 4000 hits the first day, and after the initial news burst has been holding steady around 1000 hits per day. For news topics, people want the kind of synthetic, continually updated neutral view that Wikipedia (at its best) provides. But neither mainstream media nor the new media of partisan blogs and social news sites provide this, Wikipedia avoids this except for "notable" stories, and Wikinews operates no differently from traditional news, calling a story "done" once it's published.

In my view, most of Wikinews ought to be merged with Wikipedia, leaving only Original Reporting for Wikinews. For big topics that have both ongoing news and a long, broad history, Wikipedia ought to have separate subpages for more detailed explanation of specific news events (a la Wikinews articles, but continually open to update). This will encourage the participation of the thousands of news junkies who, at present, are not particularly welcome on Wikipedia (and don't want to waste their time writing Wikinews articles no one will read, if they even know about Wikinews).

Wikimedia could do even more with news. News is the subject of continual, massive interest, and the there is a large--and mostly unmet--demand for internet discussion of news. Most internet news sources do not have even rudimentary forums for discussion, and even for the ones that do, much more discussion happens offsite than on. For example, the top link on social news site reddit right now is this article on Time's politics blog, which does not allow comments. The reddit discussion is 140 comments long and counting. Even traditional news sites that do allow comments rarely have anywhere near that level of participation, even for articles that are heavily discussed at Digg, Reddit, slashdot, and the blogosphere.

The top social news sites are only modestly popular, and there is still plenty of room for new players. If Wikimedia started a social news site, and melded it on to Wikipedia along with other features that give users more of an outlet for interaction that is not centered on article improvement, Wikipedia could probably go from the #9 site on the internet (down from #8 last year) to the #1 site. That's not an end it itself, but it would have a huge impact on content in terms of turning readers into discussants, and discussants into contributors. Every article and news story would have a sleek discussion thread (maybe dynamic ones based on users' Wikimedia social networks, or imported social network data from Facebook, MySpace, and the others).

I realize that bits and pieces of this are being done elsewhere (including Wikia, e.g., with their politics site), but Wikipedia has the userbase and reputation to actually make it work.

Along with social networking and free discussion, article policies would have to be liberalized; at the very least, the notability concept should be retired, although a more integrated system of sorting articles based on the level of reliable sourcing could be put in place instead, so that readers always have a clear idea of whether they are reading a biography of a significant figure based on the work of professional historians, or the biography of somebody's grandfather pieced together from newspaper clippings and family records.

In my next post, I'll discuss my ideas about Original Reporting for Wikinews; although my above proposals would gut the current core of Wikinews, I envision a future for Wikinews even brighter than Wikipedia's, based primarily on citizen journalism.

What's missing from the Democrats' health plans

2008-03-22T20:46:00.001Z

Despite the importance of health care (and particularly health care costs) in this U.S. election cycle, neither of the Democrats include any mention of tort reform or health courts in their health plans (Obama's; Clinton's). This has traditionally been a partisan issue, with Republicans for reforms to limit malpractice awards and Democrats against.

If newsbatch.com is to be believed, Democrats don't support tort reform because trial lawyer associations are big donors. Opensecrets.org gives a good rundown: Clinton has received over $13 million from lawyers and law firms (her top sector); Obama has received over $11 million (his top sector); McCain has received over $3 million (his second top sector after retirees). It's not that surprising that lawyers are the biggest sector for campaign donations, considering that they are wealthy and have more direct interest in politics and laws than any comparable profession. But without breaking those totals down more, it's hard to say that is specifically the reason why Dems oppose tort reform (since surely many lawyers support it, in addition to many many doctors).

Clinton does not mention malpractice or tort reform in her health plan at all. Obama, supposedly free of lobbyist influence and mostly free of big money special interest influence, mentions malpractice obliquely: "Obama will also promote new models for addressing physician errors that improve patient safety, strengthen the doctor-patient relationship, and reduce the need for malpractice suits." (p. 8) McCain's outline of a health care plan includes tort reform as one of its planks.

Hopefully more will come of that once the nomination is settled; if Obama is the Democratic nominee, that may be likely. Short of a single-payer system that eliminates the huge overhead of commercial insurance or doctors factoring cost into treatment decisions in a more serious and systematic way (both long shots for the near future), tort reform and/or health courts are the only things likely to make a serious impact on reducing the cost of health services. (Inflated pharmaceutical costs are another matter, the dynamics of which I'm still trying to figure out.)

Wikipedia traffic for content linked on the Main Page

2008-03-12T04:23:00.000Z

How much exposure comes with time on the main page of Wikipedia? The short answer: a featured article may get between 15 thousand and 100 thousand hits, depending on the mass appeal of the topic and the day of the week; a new article featured on Did you know? will bring anywhere from several hundred to several thousand hits, depending on the hook and time of day it's up; a thumbnail from In the news may get tens of thousands of hits per day, on par with a Featured Picture (which is below the fold for most visitors).

Quirky, unexpected articles do much better than articles on better known topics. Examples from February:

Peru, which typically gets 4-7 thousand hits per day, only had 37 thousand on its day in the spotlight.
"Through the Looking Glass", a Lost episode, got 100 thousand hits, compared to a normal day of about 1 thousand.
Golden plates, which usually gets 3-5 hundred hits, got 90 thousand.
Other Featured Articles at the high end of the hit spectrum: Knut the polar bear, Ronald Reagan
Articles at the low end: Barn Swallow, Constitution of Belarus, Irish phonology, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters

Consider some main page items from February 21:

The Featured Article, Bengali Language Movement: 14 thousand hits
A lunar eclipse thumbnail from In the news: 23 thousand hits
The article about that eclipse: 135 thousand hits (although possibly much of that traffic came from elsewhere; there's no baseline to judge)
Other In the news articles, some blurbs up to 5 days old: ranging from 2.5 thousand to 45 thousand.
Did you know? articles: mostly in the 500-1000 hit range (for ca. a six hour period), while the image for the top article had twice the hits of the article itself.
On this day articles: thousands of hits each, some over 10 thousand
The Featured Picture, a dragonfly macro: 17 thousands hits

The most interesting thing about these numbers, to me, is how disproportionally heavy the aggregate traffic is for In the news than for other sectors. Much of the time the main articles for the newest news entries--represented by a single line each on the Main Page--have similar hit counts to the Featured Article--which has a whole box in better screen real estate. The anniversaries also have a strong showing, especially considering their placement on the bottom right of the screen.

The next time the Main Page gets redesigned, Wikipedians might want to do some more detailed research on which elements are most popular and factor the results into the design plans.

History of science viewing stats on Wikipedia

2008-03-07T09:09:00.000Z

For the first time, there are accurate hit counts for comparing arbitrary articles. User:Henrik has a hit counter utility for Wikipedia pages, with statistics going back to mid-December 2007. (Estimated hit counts were available for up to the top 1000 most popular pages through the currently-offline WikiCharts.)

In browsing hit counts for history of science-related articles, it quickly becomes apparent that biographies have a much larger readership than explicit history articles. The monthly hit counts for the histories of science, medicine and technology (13829; 16925; and 15442, respectively, for February) are in the same range as the daily hit counts for Albert Einstein (ranging from 8,000 to 18,000 in February). Newton and Darwin bring in about half what Einstein does, and many other important figures in the history of science are in the 1,000-2,000 per day range. Unsurprisingly, most scholarly jargon concepts (important as they may be) are not read much: less than 100 hits per day for things like "Medicalization" and "Commensurability (philosophy of science)", and narrower concepts (the ones that even have articles) may get less than 10 hits per day. "Paradigm shift", however, gets almost 1,000 hits per day, and Structure of Scientific Revolutions gets a couple hundred.

I'm disappointed with what I expected to be the "head" of the distribution, the main historical overview articles, but the level of activity towards the "long tail" is relatively impressive. See, for example, the following sequence for total hits in February:

1. Science - 108271
2. History of science - 13829
3. History of biology - 4677
5. History of molecular biology - 1994
6. Phage group - 191
7. Max Delbrück - 1501
8. Luria-Delbrück experiment - 1230

These are in order of scale of the topic (and represent a possible trail of clicks), but are obviously not in order of popularity (or historiographical significance). The biography and the still-pedagogically-relevant experiment stand out with high hit counts relative to the scale of the topic.

For historians who want to reach a broad audience through Wikipedia, putting historical context into biographies and topics of contemporary interest is probably more effective than writing concept-, artifact- or event-based historical articles.

Tomorrow, I'll look at what kind of hit count boost time on the Main Page brings, and how hit counts vary according to article quality for topics of similar significance.

Sometimes, there are no words

2008-02-27T05:39:00.001Z

for the power of internet. It almost makes me cry.

My day on the Wikipedia front page

2008-02-22T23:52:00.000Z

Unexpectedly, today has been my lucky day on the Wikipedia front page.

Two nights ago I tried my hand at photographing the lunar eclipse. With plenty of experimenting, I got one image of totality I was pretty happy with (above): a one-second exposure, with my camera propped up against the back of a laptop to maintain the right angle. Longer exposures (and many of the one-second exposures I tried) had too much motion blur; shorter exposures or with higher ISO were too dark/noisy. I put it up on the February 2008 lunar eclipse page, as one of many observations from different times and places. A little while later, I got a message informing me that the image was being used for "In the news" to illustrate the eclipse on the Main Page. It's also now the lead image for the eclipse article.

Then at midnight UTC, February 22, "Today's featured article" clicked over to Rachel Carson, my last major Wikipedia project. See how it changed during it's 24 hours in the spotlight. I'm going to reverse the two most significant changes, the softening of the bit in the lead about the environmental movement and the deleted sentence about the Reagan administration's attacks on the environmental legacy of the of the 1960s, both of which are well-supported by the sources used for the article. But since it's apparently a point of contention, I'll add more backing for the Reagan bit, from something about Reagan rather than Carson.

The Carson article apparently inspired an ASCI portrait of her.

How far we have to go

2008-02-20T05:41:00.001Z

This chart comes from a post by Terry Hancock at Free Software Magazine, "Impossible thing #2: Comprehensive free knowledge repositories like Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg". It's hard to come to grips with the scale of Wikipedia, which is growing faster than anyone could keep up with reading 24/7. But any well-stocked university library has two, sometimes three, orders of magnitude more content than English Wikipedia; the aggregate collection of library material is tens of thousands of times larger the Wikipedia. Of course, many books have overlapping content and encyclopedia articles will rarely go into as much detail as books on the same topic.

But most writing that was worth printing in the first place has something of relevance for Wikipedia.

Presentism and the history of science on Wikipedia

2008-02-01T08:36:00.000Z

Christopher D. Green, a professor of psychology and philosophy at York University and president of the Society for the History of Psychology, has a strong post on the reasons academics are often turned off by Wikipedia. In the wake of my recent call to Wikipedia arms in the History of Science Society Newsletter, Green looks back on the development of the history of psychology article in the period since he expanded it by about 6,000 words (in the middle of 2007). I have a short reply on Green's blog.

the ways in which

2008-01-30T00:30:00.000Z

Have you ever heard the phrase "interested in the ways in which"? If you have, it was probably uttered by a scholar in the humanities or social sciences, describing their research interests. There's a good chance that the explanation that followed was rich in jargon, heavy on social theory, and an mostly opaque to anyone not in the same field as the speaker. It was probably also an American or a Brit. (If this doesn't ring any bells for you, take a look at the search results for "interested in the the ways in which".) As a fellow graduate student pointed out to me, "the ways in which" has a very strong connotation, marking a certain style of thinking and writing about history and society. Most people that come through giving talks to my program, whether for job talks, colloquia, or some other lectures, can pretty easily be divided into "ways in which" types and people who know how to hold an audience's attention.

Reflecting on the problems of jargon that come with writing history that is only meant for other historians, I'm working on a paper: "The Pedagogical Semiotics of Interlinguistic Anglophone Discourse, 2008-1999". On a closely related note, the grad students are think of doing either drinking games or jargon bingo to spice up future talks. "Blah blah blah, blah blah actor's category, blah blah." "Bingo!"

On another related note, every would-be historian needs to watch the latest The Simpsons, "That 90s Show", if you haven't already. See a few clips here. Choice quotes:

Suede-elbow-patched associate professor: "Look at that lighthouse! It's the ultimate expression of phallocentric technocracy violating Mother Sky." Marge: "I thought they were just tall so boats could see them." Professor: "No, Marge, everything penis-shaped is bad."
Marge: "Did you know that history is written by the winners?" Homer: "Really? I thought history was written by losers!"

Bonus link: PhD Comics on thesis titles

The pope, Feyerabend and Galileo

2008-01-29T22:32:00.000Z

Anytime you see a reference to Paul Feyerabend in the news, you can be almost certain that he's being misinterpreted or taken out of context.

As newspapers have been reporting, the pope canceled a planned inaugural speech for the beginning of term at La Sapienza University, in response to the vehement objections of a group of scientists there. As the news reports would have it, the issue was that the pope (then Cardinal Ratzinger) had defended the heresy trial and conviction of Galileo, quoting philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend that the judgment against Galileo and his heliocentric theory was 'rational and just'.

In this case (according to seemingly knowledgeable philosophers on the HOPOS mailing list and in the comments of this Leiter Reports post), Ratzinger invoked Feyerabend as one example of anti-rationalist thought, not necessarily as his own view. And the quote, while perhaps literally accurate, is a translation from the Ratzinger's Italian speech, probably based on the German version of Feyerabend (either Against Method or Farewell to Reason). Feyerabend argued that the church's position was rational in that the weight of scientific evidence really did favor heliocentrism at the time, and (to quote Barry Stocker's comment from the Leiter post) " had the right social intention, viz, to protect people from the machinations of specialists. It wanted to protect people from being corrupted by a narrow ideology that might work in restricted domains but was incapable of sustaining a harmonious life."

That is, neither Feyerabend nor Ratzinger were suggesting that the judgment was just in the sense of Galileo having been wrong about heliocentrism (or his interpretation of scripture to square with heliocentrism).

But to be fair to the scientists protesting the pope's speech, their main issue is not Galileo but the Vatican's positions about the relationship between science and the church. As one professor explained on the CBC's As It Happens (part 1, about 18 minutes in), it's the tension between a religious authority and a secular university that's the real issue; the pope has no place in the secular scholarly activities of the university, he argues.

But Galileo vs. the Church is always a good hook for a story. Don't expect the misuse of the Galileo Affair, or of Feyerabend, to go away any time soon.

"We Cannot Allow a Wikipedia Gap!" in Spontaneous Generations

2007-12-09T06:57:00.000Z

The new open-access history of science, technology and medicine journal from the University of Toronto, Spontaneous Generations, has its first issue online. I look forward to reading a lot of it; the "focused discussion" on scientific expertise looks very interesting, and both of the peer-reviewed articles look good as well.

Of course, most exciting for me is the publication of my opinion piece, the very first article in the first issue of Spontaneous Generations: "We Cannot Allow a Wikipedia Gap!" (pdf), a call for historians of science, technology and medicine to get involved with Wikipedia.

I'm going to try to work some of this content into Wikipedia (and hopefully others will help), as a way of supporting open content journals. The first one, "An Engineer’s View of an Ideal Society" (pdf), looks like a perfect source for improving Wikipedia's "C. H. Douglas" and "Social Credit" articles. The second article, "Mothers, Babies, and the Colonial State" (pdf), focuses on health reform in Nigeria from 1925 to 1945 (while it was still a British colony). This is one where it will be tougher to integrate into the existing Wikipedia coverage; there is a short article on "health care in Nigeria", but no discussion of its history. And that article is one of just two "health care in X" articles for all of Africa (the other is Uganda). There is no article on "health care in Africa". The history of medicine and public health coverage is also quite slim, making it hard to bridge the gap between the kind of work scholars in those fields do and the kinds of broader coverage that Wikipedia sometimes does well. Unfortunately, I don't know of any professional historians of medicine or grad students who are active Wikipedians.

Democratic Debate on NPR

2007-12-05T04:15:00.000Z

Finally, a debate with a little bit of actual substance. The Democratic presidential candidates debated on National Public Radio this afternoon, and not surprisingly it was a far better debate than any of the television (or YouTube) debates so far. (I caught it intermittently as I was going from store to store looking for Wiis to sell on eBay...I got one from Toys'R'Us, which should net me about $150 profit.)

The debate was focused on Iran, China, and immigration. There was nothing exciting about the Iran discussion except Clinton's dogged defense of her support of the resolution labeling the Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. Aside from wishful thinking about a Kucinich presidency, I don't have strong feelings about the Democratic field except that Clinton would be the worst choice; she's too much of a hawk and wouldn't be likely to shift the center of American political discourse far enough away from where it is now.

With the China section, I was really disappointed that none of the candidates see trade with China as primarily or significantly an ecological problem. Among other things, the ongoing New York Times series about China's pollution crisis, Choking on Growth, has convinced me that, more so than human rights, labor standards and the effects on U.S. jobs, the biggest problem with outsourcing manufacturing to China is that China has far looser environmental regulations. Trade with China (or anyone) ought to be dependent on the environmental impact of the traded product's manufacture. Unfortunately, global warming is pushing so many other acute environmental issues into the background. And even still, "make and use less stuff" isn't a solution that is a viable political position.

The End of the History of Science?

2007-11-07T20:04:00.000Z

I went to a handful of interesting talks at HSS this year.

The first was the tail-end of a session on astrology (Kepler's, in particular), which underscored the importance of the social and political forces that were driving--and have been written out of--the Scientific Revolution. The need for better, more accurate astrological advice for kings and emperors was the reason people like Kepler and Tycho Brahe had the support to do their work, and to a large extent astrology was why they were doing astronomy. Disagreements over the scope and validity of astrology also were part of the under-explored dynamics of intra-Protestant theological politics that buffeted Kepler and Tycho from patron to patron. The situation with early modern alchemy, driven more by practical than mystical concerns, has similarly been neglected in the big-picture accounts. Neither astrology nor alchemy figure much into Peter Dear's 2001 Revolutionizing the Sciences or Steven Shapin's 1996 The Scientific Revolution, supposedly the two main post-"social turn" Sci Rev reevaluations.

The next good talk was Stephen Weldon's on Francis Schaeffer and his influence of modern American Protestant attitudes toward science. Anyone trying to understand the Intelligent Design movement and the reasons it has been considerably more successful among non-Fundamentalists than the Creation Science of the 1970s and 80s was, needs to know about Schaeffer.

But the most interesting session was The End of Science. It was nominally organized around John Horgan's 1996 book The End of Science. Unfortunately, Horgan phoned it in on this one, delivering a talk that basically consisted of his 2006 Discover magazine article (which I blogged about a year ago when I first discovered Horgan's work). But between Horgan and Andre Wakefield's talk on "The End of the History of Science?", discussing the disciplinary fate of history of science as something set apart from garden-variety history, there was plenty to rile up the crowd (as much as historians can get riled up). Wakefield was celebrating the facts that (unlike in the bad old days of Sartonian handmaiden-to-science history) one no longer needs to understand the science one does the history of, and that history of science is being absorbed into the disciplinary structure of straight history.

One of the striking things about HSS is how little one historian has in common with the next. There were up to 12 sessions going on at once, so you could stay within your temporal, geographical and disciplinary areas of interest (and probably within your historiographical approach, as well). One of the things meetings like this make apparent is the degree to which collegiality and networking (along with university press editors) drive careers in history of science (and in history more generally), rather than peer evaluations of intellectual output. It's all about the parties and receptions after the day's talks are over.

Back from History of Science Society meeting

2007-11-05T14:36:00.001Z

I'm home from an exhausting weekend at the History of Science Society meeting. For a number of reasons, I had a great time: I now know enough people that I can make introductions between people with similar interests; I had my camera (see my Flickr set); I wasn't giving a paper; my reputation as a Wikipedian occasionally preceded me; and I even learned something at a couple of talks.

I had intended to do some live-blogging during the sessions, but the connectivity wasn't good enough. I'll have to settle for a few reflective posts (forthcoming) on good sessions, on the state of the field, on the historian social scene, etc.

What are historians good for? Part II

2007-10-23T07:44:00.000+01:00

In my first post to Revise and Dissent, I lamented that historians don't have good answers to the question: "Why does your work matter to anyone who is not an historian?" I heard two very engaging talks over the last 8 days, from two historians of science and medicine with very different takes on the issue.

Last week, Alice Dreger gave probably the most provocative colloquium talk I've heard at Yale. Dreger is an intersex rights activist and "medical humanist" who has worked to change the barbaric practices of genital surgery for children with disorders of sex development (or whatever you want to call the conditions; terminology is a charged issue here), often without even informing the parents. She also became involved in recent controversies over transsexualism and the book The Man Who Would Be Queen, and she's written social/medical histories of hermaphrodites and "unusual anatomies".

In a great talk that simultaneously made her seem brazenly self-promoting and bracingly altruistic, Dreger explained how she has been doing what she calls "onion-peeling": private histories about individuals (shared only with the subject) that place people's lives, or specific traumatic events in their lives, into historical context. She described how powerful these short (4-6 pages, usually) self-contained histories were to their subjects. For many, reading their own history in someone else's words was a cathartic experience that let them understand and accept their pasts (e.g., why a doctor had performed an infant clitoridectomy, and why their family had never discussed the issue during childhood).

These personal histories are nearly useless for doing academic history, since they are performed on the explicit condition of privacy and the subject-driven interview-and-revision procedure introduces grave reliability problems by normal oral history standards. As Dreger explained it, the main benefit of doing these "onion-peelings" is the personal satisfaction of seeing your work have a direct and substantial positive impact on someone's life. She hinted that she sees normal history as a powerful force for social good as well, but with effects that are harder to see (and so harder to feel good about). The end-game of the talk was that Dreger is considering starting a non-profit to help other historians do "onion-peeling" (client-centered histories), and maybe even provide funding for them to do so.

Topics of discussion after the presentation included: the line between onion-peel history and psychoanalysis; legal and emotional liability; the permissibility of glossing over historical ambiguity for the benefit of an audience of one; and how such pro bono work could fit into the expectations of modern academia. I, for one, find the idea of client-centered histories compelling, but not something I would actually consider doing. It's a better answer to the blog title question than nothing, but I think there are more efficient (though maybe not as personally rewarding) ways for historians to serve the public, if they are actually willing to do something outside the professional norms.

Today, William Newman gave a talk on why Newton (and many other smart people in the 17th and 18th centuries) practiced alchemy, and how there was a smooth transition from alchemy to chymistry to chemistry. Even Lavoisier, says Newman, was doing basically the same kinds of things Newton had been doing a century before--just with more sophisticated and precise apparatus (and a clever theory of combustion). Despite substantial treatments of Newton's alchemy by earlier historians such as Richard Westfall, Newman thinks that most work on the Scientific Revolution is badly flawed because early historians of alchemy didn't understand the technical aspects of alchemy (and so overemphasized the metaphorical and occult aspects).

Newman and others have been working out what Newton was actually doing in his workshop. (He described a Newton not so different from the character in The Baroque Cycle.) Newman did a live alchemy demonstration, showing how certain minerals would show signs of life (substances that form fast-growing crystals when put in a chemical solution, e.g., a "silica garden"), and how nitric acid could be (and was) used supposedly to transmute silver into gold (by depletion gilding). Newman explained why transmutation was part of the agenda of the legitimate, "scientific" alchemists like Newton: in the 17th century there was no NSF; the promise of transmutation was a sort of "grant application" of sorts, which he compared to modern justifications for research funding that promise a cure for cancer (which the young field of molecular biology used to great effect in the 1950s and ever since, but with a cure still seeming as far off as ever.) Transmutation wasn't inconceivable, but the alchemists had more practical, immediate goals for their work and would use the lure of unlimited alchemical wealth for their patrons to their own ends.

With NSF funding, Newman is building a complete online collection of Newton's alchemy manuscripts (which are scattered about the globe, since many were auctioned off in the early 20th century): The Chymistry of Isaac Newton. The site has seen considerable popular interest; there is a lot of enthusiasm about Newton among non-historians. But when I asked Newman "Why does your work matter to anyone who is not an historian?", he stumbled. (This after his eloquent, obviously well-practiced explanation of why it matters to other historians of science). Answering that question, he said, is like "tilting at windmills"; historical myths like Columbus discovering that the Earth is round persist, even though historians have known them to be false for several generations. The misinformed "army of middle-school teachers" create a closed loop of misinformation that propagates from generation to generation, a seemingly insoluble problem.

Myths about alchemy (and the flat earth, and the conflict between science and religion, and Ptolemaic astronomy, and many others) are doubly pernicious and recalcitrant because they serve as a purpose, as foil for their modern counterparts. Newman is pessimistic that any significant changes in public (mis)perceptions of the history of science are possible, since these myths acquire their own momentum.

I think Wikipedia is changing that, and changing the whole way the public uses and understands history--e.g., see Flat Earth and Flat Earth mythology--but that's a topic for another post (and for the article for the History of Science Society Newsletter that I'm working on). If you got this far, thanks, and sorry for the blogorrhoea.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent]

Craig Venter is making history

2007-10-08T00:39:00.000+01:00

...or at least trying to.

Venter's J. Craig Venter Institute, the successor of TIGR and TCAG, has been working on what they characterize as the first man-made organism: Mycoplasma laboratorium. The ongoing project centers on "Synthia", a slimmed-down synthetic chromosome that they are calling (and patenting as) a "minimal bacterial genome". It consists of 381 of the ca. 470 genes of the tiny parasitic bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium. (The name "Synthia" comes not from Venter, et. al., but from the critical ETC Group; it seems to have stuck.) Add Synthia to an empty cell, and viola! Life!

The project builds on earlier work in which Venter's team (led by restriction enzyme pioneer and Nobel laureate Hamilton O. Smith, Clyde A. Hutchinson, III and Cynthia Pfannkoch) recreated the genome of the bacteriophage phi X-174 from scratch and stuck it into an empty coat to create a viable phage; they generated the 5,386 base pair sequence in 14 days. In the 2003 PNAS report, they described a plan to use similarly-sized chunks of synthetic DNA to assemble whole genomes. Since the phi X-174 project, they have been developing and improving DNA cloning methods that can deal with ever larger target sequences without high levels of error--a boon for DNA sequencing as well as chromosome synthesis. (Synthetic phi X-174 could be selected for infectivity to week out high-error sequences, but that's not an option with arbitrary 5,000 bp "gene cassettes".)

Since 2003, they've gotten to the point of putting together a whole genome (if a very small one). They quietly started filing patents for "Synthia" in 2006, and in June 2007 announced that man-made life in the form of M. laboratorium was right around the corner. Proving that the synthetic genome is viable by sticking it into a genome-less cell and making it live will be a powerful proof-of-concept for new and more drastic kinds of genetic engineering.

"Man-made life" makes a great headline, but it's worth picking apart. At the fundamental level, even Venter's team is quick to note that M. laboratorium won't be a wholesale synthetic organism, as it will rely on the molecular machinery and cellular environment taken from natural cells. (At least, as natural as a laboratory organism with its genome carefully removed can be.) The conflation of genes with life has been the constant complaint of all the biologists except the molecular ones since the rise of molecular biology. It was one of the chief complaints of those who thought the Human Genome Project was (all funding levels being equal) a bad idea. In a recent article in I forget which history of science journal, (atheist) Emile Zuckerkandl accuses HGP leader (Christian-turned-atheist-turned-Christian) Francis Collins of exploiting the genes=life fallacy in his best-selling quasi-intelligent design book The Language of God. (The language of God, of course, is the genome.) The all-powerful gene is a potent political and rhetorical force (and has been a great basis for securing grants, at least since the 1940s), even if biological reality is considerably more complex.

But even looking past the conflation of a genome with life itself, M. laboratorium has a dubious claim as synthetic life. As the ETC Group points out, "Synthia" only distinguishes itself from a natural chromosome by what is missing (i.e., a fifth of its genes). This organism would have a shakier claim at being man-made life even than the 1972 oil-eating bacterium of Diamond v. Chakrabarty (the landmark patent case that established the legitimacy of patenting genetically-engineering lifeforms); at least Chakrabarty's bug had a combination of characteristics that no natural organism had. Does putting together most of the DNA of an organism (which happens to be synthesized artificially) together with everything but the DNA of that organism mean scientists have created artificial life? It's hard not to invoke Frankenstein.

Venter has been very successful at framing his science in ways that grab headlines, generate public interest, and seem self-evidently of central historical importance (whatever the later historical verdict). I haven't decided whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. He's certainly earning his place in history, one headline and Discovery channel documentary at a time.

BibliOdyssey on Commons

2007-10-05T01:24:00.000+01:00

Peacay of the amazing BibliOdyssey blog has joined Wikimedia Commons (after a bit of encouragement from me). BibliOdyssey, which focuses on scans of printed art, is quite an amazing blog; it serves as a continual reminder of just how big the web is, and how little of it the typical person ever sees. Hundreds of libraries and archives are digitizing thousands of fantastic images, and Peacay trawls through the wide web and finds the best of them.

Unfortunately (as I understand it), although most of the original versions of what Peacay showcases are public domain, the copyright status of most of the images are in that murky space between free and unfree. The United States is fortunate (or maybe unfortunate if you are a world class library) to have Bridgeman v. Corel (for now, at least), but in most countries, a "sweat of the brow" doctrine means that whoever scans the pages of a rare book can claim copyright on the scans, even if the original is public domain. Even in the United States, it is typical for libraries to assert copyright control over scans of public domain material they own (e.g., as the University of Oklahoma does on its wonderful, growing collection of history of science images). Of course, no one on the web pays much attention to such claims (whether they have legal force or not), but for many of the images on Commons, a re-user trying to publish nominally free images in the traditional publishing world will still have to go through the usual trials and tribulations to secure permissions.

Anyhow, check out the great image sets Peacay has uploaded so far, and hopefully we'll see more in the future.

video games, culture, and addiction

2007-09-25T21:27:00.000+01:00

I have a post on video games and addiction at Revise and Dissent.

Urgency

2007-09-24T02:46:00.000+01:00

(cross-posted to Revise and Dissent)

The other day, I was chatting with a scientist about the history of science and related matters. When I told him I had taken a class on "Biology and Society", focused on eugenics and genetics, he replied something to the effect of "that's not really history of science, is it?" Actually, it was more of a statement than a question.

This scientist, quite eminent in his field, had a positive reaction to my current project (on the history of molecular evolution), but was rather cool on the field in general. He sees little of value, he confided, in "anthropological studies of science" (which I took to refer specifically to the work of Karin Knorr-Cetina, though I can't be sure).

The main constituency of the history of science, aside from fellow historians of science, has traditionally been scientists and philosophers of science. The field has been growing for decades, but (in general, at least) moving away from the kinds of work that interest scientists or philosophers.

Case studies, rich in social significance but representing only a small slice of the scientific past, have become the norm. Even so, like most history today, the majority of it is only intelligible or interesting to other humanist scholars.

Though the field has grown rapidly since the mid-twentieth century, the scope of the scientific enterprise has grown much faster. A grad student can hardly write a seminar paper on post-WWII science without stumbling upon a handful of possible dissertation topics in virgin historical territory. Synthesis and grand narrative seem beyond reach, and moving further every day.

It's enough to put one into a panic, if the state of historiography of any field were something to panic about. (Part of my own ham-fisted response was to try to piece together a comprehensive "History of Biology" article on Wikipedia.)

When I shared with the scientist my concern about the history of science accumulating faster than historians of science could handle, he said, "Give it time." But if it's not important, if it can wait, what's the point in doing it at all?

My answer that question has a lot to do with why I contribute to Wikipedia.

Crooked Timber on Wikipedia

2007-09-08T01:06:00.000+01:00

John Quiggin, Crooked Timber blogger and some-time Wikipedian, has a good post about Wikipedia and its upcoming milestone (millstone?) of 2,000,000 articles, "Wikipedia at 2 million".

It's followed by a lively discussion: 124 comments and counting. Well worth the price of admission, with plenty of crotchety knowledge workers pouring in from a link at the Chronicle of Higher Education blog about blogs, Footnoted.

Update: see comment #125.

Revise and Dissent

2007-09-05T17:02:00.001+01:00

The semester is just starting, I've found a time my whole dissertation committee can meet for the prospectus defense (which means Yale will now let me enroll, hopefully), and it's my birthday. After a couple great discussions with committee members, I'm excited about my dissertation project; I'll share more about that when I get the chance.

More importantly, I've been invited to join the History News Network group blog Revise and Dissent. Here's my first post: "What are historians good for?"