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Scientific Communication in History
Scientific Communication in History by Brian C. Vickery The Scarecrow Press, 2000. US $55.00 (253 pages) ISBN 0 8108 3598 3 An anthropologist spending time in a laboratory would be most struck, not by the experiments or the talk, but by the obsession with ritual inscription. So, at any rate, it seemed to Steve Woolgar and Bruno Latour some years ago. Of course, they knew perfectly well that there was more to laboratory life than setting everything down in a form that could be sent out of it. But they had a serious point to make about the importance of communication in science: for staking claim to new facts and enabling them to be discussed in other places; ultimately, for ensuring that what was found in the laboratory counted as knowledge. Brian Vickery is a much more traditional student of science but for his purposes, too, how scientists set down and transmit their findings is the most important thing going on. His history of scientific communication gives an overview of all the ways current knowledge has been recorded, whether to ensure fidelity to past authority or inform new investigations. Permanent recording begins with writing and if your definition of scientific communication is pretty expansive you can go back several millennia to find the first inscriptions. Vickery’s certainly is, so he begins with cuneiform tablets and then offers a fairly standard account of the origins of science in classical Greece and the transmission of ancient knowledge in the medieval period. The scientific revolution, like the Renaissance, was as much a revolution in communication as in intellectual outlook. We might say the part of the story which we moderns can still feel part of began ~500 years ago, in 1495. That year saw the appearance of the first scientific book of any significance in English, the publication, at Westminster, of the Franciscan Bartholomew’s popular encyclopaedia De proprietatibus rerum. But this was a printing of a 50-year-old translation of a 350-year-old text, itself mainly composed of extracts from the classical authorities. Going beyond such works, looking forward instead of back, called into being not just new kinds of books but new ways of communicating which expedited collective investigation. The new correspondence networks that were spun around bodies like the Royal Society, for example, prefigured
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today’s e-mail bulletin boards. Both were essential for communal discussion of new findings and ideas. These, too, are part of Vickery’s account. But one senses his heart is really in the history of ways of keeping track of all this information once it is published more formally – not just through building up libraries, but by devising ever more elaborate means of indexing, abstracting and retrieval. It is hard to say when the world’s stock of useful knowledge passed that crucial threshold which put it beyond the attention span of a single human mind. The maximum amount of information a person can process and stay sane might be roughly indicated by someone such as Albrecht von Haller. In the second half of the 18th century he not only wrote some 13 000 scientific papers of his own, but also published bibliographies of botany and medicine covering some 65 000 books and papers. Even for Haller, let alone us ordinary mortals, the amount of stuff out there has long since grown out of all proportion to our ability to make sense of it.
It is hard to say when the world’s stock of useful knowledge passed that crucial threshold which put it beyond the attention span of a single human mind Our collective efforts to deal with this have had mixed results. In some respects, we have come a long way. What would the astronomers who laboriously recorded star positions on clay tablets in Mesopotamia in 1650 BC make of the Centre de Donnees Stellaires’ gateway on the World Wide Web? In 1997, it provided access to over 1400 online star catalogues, some of them listing over half a million entries. By contrast, when researchers in one discipline need to know something of the techniques or findings of another, the most efficient way to zero in on what they need is probably still to ask them. And any number of studies of scientific collaboration and technological innovation in industry underline a truth known to traders and intelligencers for millennia – knowledge travels best inside people’s heads. At the same time, the Internet gives all of us ready contact with people who share our interests, no matter where they are. But it raises a permanent question of how many
people one can interact with fruitfully. We all fear the working day when there is only just time to answer all the e-mails that greet us when we log on in the morning or before leaving at night. The advent of the Internet underlines the fact that, like other aspects of scientific practice, scientific communication has grown and changed enormously in the last half century. Now, as the implications of the World Wide Web begin to unfold, it is poised to change again. Free access to electronic journals could make primary scientific communication easier than it has ever been. Scientific Communication in History reviews the emergence of the Internet but, understandably, does not go very far into this world and eschews speculation about where electronic communication is leading. But its long perspective on how humans have sent and stored messages about how they understand the world to be will be a useful background for understanding what changes and what stays the same in future. As Vickery covers the whole span of human history in ~200 pages, much of his complex story is only sketched, especially in the later stages. But the whole thing is solidly rooted in his lifetime’s interest in the subject. Little of significance escapes him, although he does not mention Adrian Johns’ wonderful microhistory of the seventeenthcentury London book trade1, which brings a fresh eye to the historical achievement of the features of the book which we now take for granted – its authenticity, uniformity of text and stability. But Johns, as I say, is state-of-the-art microhistory, while Vickery is aiming for the grand sweep. He certainly carries through his modestly stated aim of providing a ‘brief historical overview … paying particular attention to the origins of each form of communication’. As he also acknowledges, the book is based on secondary sources, is often selective and is biased toward communication in English. But it succeeds admirably in its ambition to offer a handy guide to a subject on which much historical research remains to be done. Like all the best scholarly communication, Vickery’s contribution offers a solid foundation for further work. Reference 1 Johns, A. (1998) The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, University of Chicago Press
Jon Turney
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today’s e-mail bulletin boards. Both were essential for communal discussion of new findings and ideas. These, too, are part of Vickery’s account. But one senses his heart is really in the history of ways of keeping track of all this information once it is published more formally – not just through building up libraries, but by devising ever more elaborate means of indexing, abstracting and retrieval. It is hard to say when the world’s stock of useful knowledge passed that crucial threshold which put it beyond the attention span of a single human mind. The maximum amount of information a person can process and stay sane might be roughly indicated by someone such as Albrecht von Haller. In the second half of the 18th century he not only wrote some 13 000 scientific papers of his own, but also published bibliographies of botany and medicine covering some 65 000 books and papers. Even for Haller, let alone us ordinary mortals, the amount of stuff out there has long since grown out of all proportion to our ability to make sense of it.
It is hard to say when the world’s stock of useful knowledge passed that crucial threshold which put it beyond the attention span of a single human mind Our collective efforts to deal with this have had mixed results. In some respects, we have come a long way. What would the astronomers who laboriously recorded star positions on clay tablets in Mesopotamia in 1650 BC make of the Centre de Donnees Stellaires’ gateway on the World Wide Web? In 1997, it provided access to over 1400 online star catalogues, some of them listing over half a million entries. By contrast, when researchers in one discipline need to know something of the techniques or findings of another, the most efficient way to zero in on what they need is probably still to ask them. And any number of studies of scientific collaboration and technological innovation in industry underline a truth known to traders and intelligencers for millennia – knowledge travels best inside people’s heads. At the same time, the Internet gives all of us ready contact with people who share our interests, no matter where they are. But it raises a permanent question of how many
people one can interact with fruitfully. We all fear the working day when there is only just time to answer all the e-mails that greet us when we log on in the morning or before leaving at night. The advent of the Internet underlines the fact that, like other aspects of scientific practice, scientific communication has grown and changed enormously in the last half century. Now, as the implications of the World Wide Web begin to unfold, it is poised to change again. Free access to electronic journals could make primary scientific communication easier than it has ever been. Scientific Communication in History reviews the emergence of the Internet but, understandably, does not go very far into this world and eschews speculation about where electronic communication is leading. But its long perspective on how humans have sent and stored messages about how they understand the world to be will be a useful background for understanding what changes and what stays the same in future. As Vickery covers the whole span of human history in ~200 pages, much of his complex story is only sketched, especially in the later stages. But the whole thing is solidly rooted in his lifetime’s interest in the subject. Little of significance escapes him, although he does not mention Adrian Johns’ wonderful microhistory of the seventeenthcentury London book trade1, which brings a fresh eye to the historical achievement of the features of the book which we now take for granted – its authenticity, uniformity of text and stability. But Johns, as I say, is state-of-the-art microhistory, while Vickery is aiming for the grand sweep. He certainly carries through his modestly stated aim of providing a ‘brief historical overview … paying particular attention to the origins of each form of communication’. As he also acknowledges, the book is based on secondary sources, is often selective and is biased toward communication in English. But it succeeds admirably in its ambition to offer a handy guide to a subject on which much historical research remains to be done. Like all the best scholarly communication, Vickery’s contribution offers a solid foundation for further work. Reference 1 Johns, A. (1998) The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, University of Chicago Press
Jon Turney