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The future historian: Reflections on the archives of contemporary sciences
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences xxx (2015) 1e7
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The future historian: Reflections on the archives of contemporary sciences Soraya de Chadarevian* University of California Los Angeles, Department of History and Institute for Society and Genetics, 6265 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Available online xxx
Historians working on recent science work close to where the archives are created or become accessible. Based on this experience, the essay presents a reflection on the archives of contemporary life sciences. It addresses three questions: firstly, what is special about the archival situation of contemporary sciences? Secondly, which sources do contemporary historians use and what opportunities and challenges do they offer? And finally, what potential changes to the archives of contemporary sciences are we witnessing? The essay draws a distinction between, on the one side, the history of science when the actors are still aliveda situation that presents a particular set of issues in respect to the available sourcesdand, on the other side, questions relating specifically to the life sciences at the turn of the millenniumda period which will eventually not be considered as ’contemporary’ any more. It reviews changes in scientific practice, historiographical trends and archival practices and considers the place of paper records, digital sources, material artefacts and oral sources in the archives of contemporary sciences. It argues that the commercialisation and privatisation of science may prove a bigger problem for the future historian than the shift to the digital medium. It concludes by welcoming the closer interactions between scientists, historians, curators and archivists prompted by recent developments. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Contemporary science Archives Future historian Things Oral history interviews
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Some sources make a big splash. A recent example is the letter penned by Crick to his twelve-year old son Michael in May 1953 that described the structure of the DNA double helix before it appeared in print. The letter had been in private hand for sixty years, when his son decided to sell it. It fetched an unprecedented six million dollars, paid by an anonymous buyer. This was more than all the other Crick papers together that were acquired by the Wellcome Trust a decade earlier for what then seemed a very hefty price. The sale of the letter was widely reported in the media and although the original document is held in an undisclosed location, digital copies now pop up on countless internet sites. More usually, historical documents or sourcesdespecially if of the paper kinddlead a more discrete life. They are collected in boxes and line the shelves of archives. History depends on sources.
* Tel.: þ1 310 267 4767. E-mail address: [email protected].
Where there are no sources (of some kind) there is no history. The reverse: where there is no interest in history there are no archives also holds true, although not all collections of documents and things presuppose a future historian; they may be kept for legal, emotional or other reasonsdlike sheer inertiadand only eventually become sources for historical research. What stories historians write and what sources they use as well as the shape of archives and the kind of sources that are collected and kept changes over time. These changes depend on historiographical trends and changes in the historical subject matter as much as on shifts in archival collecting practices and the interests and meanings that sustain them. This sounds all rather obvious, but when we start thinking about these relations, they become increasingly complex, perhaps especially so in the history of science where the question of archives has only recently started gaining theoretical attention and where there remains a tension between the scientific enterprise that supposedly is all about the future and the historical enterprise that looks back
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.08.004 1369-8486/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: de Chadarevian, S., The future historian: Reflections on the archives of contemporary sciences, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.08.004
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in time.1 The meeting convened at the Wellcome Library that gathered historians, archivists and scientists and where the essays collected in this issue were first presented, offered a welcome occasion to think about these matters. My reflections are based on my experience as a historian working on recent science as well as on my participation in various archive related committees, including especially the advisory board of the now defunct National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists in Britain, where I was first introduced to many of the issues concerning scientific archives.2 Historians working on recent events work close to where records move from private hand to public repositories and at times they become themselves involved in the process by convincing scientists to deposit their papers or donate a piece of equipment to a museum rather than throw them out. As I have argued elsewhere, in this modest sense every recent historian is also a bit of an archivist (de Chadarevian, 2013). The essay is structured around three questions: firstly, what is special about the archival situation of contemporary sciences? Secondly, which sources do contemporary historians use and what opportunities and challenges do they offer? And finally, what potential changes to the archives of contemporary sciences are we witnessing? To tackle these questions the essay will review changes in scientific practice, historiographical trends and archival practices and consider the place of paper records, digital sources, material artefacts and oral sources in the archives of contemporary sciences. 1. What is special about contemporary science? There is a range of meanings for the term ‘contemporary history’. Some take it to mean ‘still in living memory’, so roughly the last eighty years. In a more narrow sense it may be understood as the shared memory of most of the adult population, hence extending to about thirty years. On other occasions the ‘contemporary’ stretches to the events that define the current era which can be a longer or shorter period.3 The first two definitions are most relevant for our concerns here. Writing history when the actors are still alive raises a set of particular issues regarding the availability of the access to sources. Many sources will still be held in private hand. If they are deposited, access will be restricted. At the same time, actors may be available for interviews and might provide access to sources that may not end up in an archive later. However, when we speak of contemporary science today, we may mean specifically science in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Eventually this period will not be considered ‘contemporary’ any more but some specific issues, like for instance the much broader adoption of the digital medium, may still define this period. I suggest that it is important to keep this distinction clearly in mind to avoid confusion.4 In the contemporary period, we have witnessed quite decisive changes in the sciences. When Bruno Latour visited a cutting edge biological laboratory in California in the early 1970s, he was struck by the obsession of the researchers with literary devices, mostly involving paper technologies (Latour & Woolgar, 1979). Were he to visit a laboratory today, he might be surprised by the fact that most
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For a critical perspective on this opposition and the ‘deep historicity’ of certain sciences linked to enormous archiving efforts see Daston (2012). The quote is on p. 162. 2 For a short description of the work of the National Cataloguing Unit see http:// archiveshub.ac.uk/contributors/ncuacs.html. (Accessed 7 May 2015). 3 See Catterall (1997); also entry ‘Contemporary history’ in Wikipedia, http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_history. (Accessed 7 May 2015). 4 On the historiographical challenges posed by the study of late twentieth century sciences, both in respect to specific features of the sciences in this period and in respect to writing recent history, see Söderqvist (1997) and Doel & Söderqvist (2006).
scientists stare at computer screensdmuch like the rest of the population does. The omnipresence of the computer is not the only change in the way science is conducted. The size of the enterprise has grown dramatically. Aided by new communication technologies, scientific projects, also in the biomedical sciences, are often conducted in large collaborative teams, distributed over many laboratories. The term biomedicine was created to denote a new assemblage of science, medicine and commercial developments (Gaudillière, 2002). Sociologists have described these changes as a transition from ‘mode 1’ to ‘mode 2’ science, a distinction that historians have criticised, although many would agree that major changes have taken place in the postwar period (Gibbons et al., 1994; Nowotny, Scott, & Gibbons, 2001). The commercialisation of science as well as the expansion of secret military science have important implications for the availability of archival sources. The historian Peter Galison has exposed the staggering amount of classified material that is being produced in the US alone (an estimated five to ten times more than what is openly available), the extravagant efforts that are invested in keeping it secret and the damaging effects secrecy has on knowledge production and democracy (Galison, 2004).5 Company archives are routinely closed, while the distinctions between private and public sector science are increasingly blurred.6 At the same time, history of sciencedfollowing Latour and othersdunderwent a historiographical transformation, often described as practice turn or cultural turn. It resulted in an increased interest in the production of scientific knowledge and the material and social practices that sustain it.7 The changes in the way the sciences are conducted as well as in the historiography of the sciences have an impact on what kind of materials scientists leave behind, which material finds its way into the archivesdoften a highly serendipitous process that in any case only captures a very small fraction of the potential source materialdand what kind of sources historians look for. These changes do not always go step in step. Scientific archives themselves have seen major changes, partly in response to the developments just described. Another example is the commercialisation of some scientific archives, most notably those of Nobel Prize winning molecular biologists. The price tag involved for acquiring such collections is forcing repositories to re-think their acquisition policies, to collaborate with other archives and overall to adopt a more pro-active attitude (Shaw, in this issue). A closer consideration of the different kinds of sources historians of contemporary sciences may be using will provide further insight into the changing nature of scientific archives.
2. Paper archives Historians, including historians of science, generally feel most at home in paper archives and visiting an archive belongs to the initiation rites of becoming a historian. The term ‘archive’ without any further qualification generally means ‘paper archive’ although of course there are all kinds of other archives, such as picture, film and oral history archives.
5 Galison and others have made clear that the problem with secret science, both commercial and military, is not just a question of access to classified material but of the effects of secrecy regimes on the content and the role of knowledge itself; see for instance Gusterson (1996), Dennis (2006), Masco (2010), Wellerstein (2010) and Balmer (2012). For a first-hand account of the experience of working with security clearance in a government archive with classified scientific material see Fitzpatrick (2006). 6 On the increasing privatisation especially of the biomedical sciences and the growing interdependence of ‘private’ and ‘public’ domains see, among others, Thackray (1998) and Harvey & McMeekin (2007). 7 For a general introduction to this historiographical shift see Golinski (1998).
Please cite this article in press as: de Chadarevian, S., The future historian: Reflections on the archives of contemporary sciences, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.08.004
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Nevertheless, archive-based history is a surprisingly recent invention; the new historiographical trend, based on the critical reading of sources, originated in nineteenth-century Germany.8 It went hand in hand with a historical interest in large-scale political events like the formation of states and nations and the creation of legal systems that was (and could be) based exclusively on the study of archival documentary sources, including especially administrative papers that were being amassed by various institutions for legal reasons. As these brief remarks indicate, archives are created according to established practices and institutional logics that constrict and discipline as much as they facilitate historical research (Foucault, 2003). To take a rather harmless example, we are used to a subdivision into institutional and personal archives as well as to the separation of paper records from other types of records. Photographs are kept in special boxes (also for preservation issues). I remember the surprise effect when I once came across some pieces of colourful material in a box of papers in the Manuscript Division of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. They were tissue samples with crystal pattern designs tacked to a letter by the manufacturer addressed to one of the crystallographers involved in supplying the original patterns to help him choose the material for a tie he had ordered. Probably, the fact that the samples were stapled to the letter saved them from being separated from the paper records as un-stapling them would have damaged the letter. In fact, scientists often collect some scientific paraphernalia among their papers. In rare cases these are kept as part of the archival collections. This can produce some headaches to archivist. Recently I ordered a box, promisingly labelled: ‘Model’ from a provisional list of papers by molecular biologist Aaron Klug that were newly acquired by Churchill College in Cambridge. A box of unusual dimensions was placed on my table. Inside the box was a 3D model, about 80 cm long and 25 cm wide. There was no description accompanying the model. Such a description may follow once the collection is catalogued. Nevertheless, the archivist proudly pointed to the clever work of his colleagues that had fabricated the box to archive the model. Yet despite the artfully constructed archive box, the model looked strangely out of place. The reason for paper archives to occasionally accept objects in their collections is not primarily because of their value as sources but because they look good on displays. For instance, the same archive that took in Klug’s model also keeps Thatcher’s handbag about which historian Ludmilla Jordanova has so eloquently written (Jordanova, 2012; pp. xxexxii). More generally, archivists insist that objects do not have a proper place in archives, that they do not possess the skills or the space to preserve them, and that the objects are more properly housed in science museums.9
8 On the rise of the historical seminar and the practice of archival history see Smith (1995). 9 For examples of this stance see de Chadarevian (2013), p. 636. The fate of Henry Wellcome’s collection further illustrates the point. Wellcome, like other turn-ofthe-twentieth-century collectors, acquired both papers and objects documenting medical practices around the globe. However, after his death his collection was first consolidated and then split up with text sources being kept in the Wellcome Library and Archives and the objects auctioned off, donated or given on permanent loan to museums around the world. Important recipients for non-medical objects were the British Museum as well as the Fowler Museum at the University of California Los Angeles that in the mid-1960s received 30 000 objects which form the core of its African and Pacific ethnographic holdings; see Fowler Museum, Overview of collections. http://fowler.ucla.edu/collections. (Accessed 7 May 2015). The Science Museum in London received the bulk of the medical objects. Today the ‘Wellcome Collections’ in the Wellcome building include the library and archives and a space for temporary exhibitions but the main artefact holdings remain at the Science Museum. On Wellcome’s collecting practices and the history of his collection see Russell (1986) and Larson (2009). The first title includes a full list of all the museums that received material from Henry Wellcome’s original collection. I thank Julia Sheppard for essential feedback on this issue.
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I mention things because with the ‘practice turn’ historians of science have developed a keen interest in things such as instruments, models, teaching materials and more as sources for their investigations. However, the lack of things is not the only challenge contemporary historians encounter in archives. More often than not, the papers they may be interested in have not yet been deposited or have not been catalogued. This last problem is not unique to archives of contemporary sciences but it is more likely to happen with recent paper acquisitions. At times historians get access to filing cabinets, files and boxes of archival material before they are deposited. As exciting as this may be the more frustrating it can become to find the relevant file references when the material eventually gets archived and catalogued. Theoretically it should be possible to track every file but in practice the process can be very troublesome. Some documents can never be found again. Nevertheless, these are situations historians and archivists are more or less used to deal with. The move of much of science and of scientific communication to a digital format poses a different and arguably more serious challenge to archive-based history. Some have painted this as the end of the archive and of history as we know it.10 It is certainly true that ‘digitally born’ material poses special problems for archival preservation because of its ephemeral nature and because of the fast pace with which computer soft- and hardware become obsolete. An additional problem (although perhaps also part of the solution) is to determine what ‘the original’ is as every document exists in multiple copies.11 However, archivists have been thinking about these issues for a while. They share these problems with scientists who rely on historical data, like for instance astronomers, and with other institutions, and they are increasingly confident that solutions will or are being found.12 Archival techniques will change. Archivists and possibly historians will need to become skilled in the use of old software programs or forward conversion routines to retrieve historic source material. Yet as archive based history has survived the invention of the telephone, we can confidently predict that it will survive the invention of digital communications.13 Indeed, in many ways more communication acts leave tangible traces.14 People, including scientists, are incessantly emailing, blogging and tweeting. People write emails rather than using the phone or talking to colleagues and increasingly it is the case that a
10 For references to the ‘digital dark ages’ see R. Harvey, ‘So where’s the black hole in our collective memory? A provocative position paper’, Digital preservation Europe, 2008. https://web.archive.org/web/20110413110146/http://www. digitalpreservationeurope.eu/publications/position/Ross_Harvey_black_hole_PPP. pdf. (Accessed 24 July 2015) as well as O’Toole (2002), pp. 58e59. 11 A problem often mentioned in this context is that of the ‘data deluge’ that supposedly characterises recent science and is exasperated by the digital medium. However, historical studies suggest that earlier generations of scientists, and presumably archivists, equally struggled with an overflow of information. Ironically, and not unlike in the current situation, the same scientists who suffered from the information deluge contributed to its further expansion by providing the tools to maintain it. For an excellent exposition of this point see Müller-Wille & Charmantier (2012). 12 On the archival efforts of astronomers and other ‘sciences of the archive’ see Daston (2012). 13 On the archival and record keeping response to the introduction of the telephone see Johnson (2011). As Johnson acknowledges, this is an area that deserves further investigation. I thank Jenny Shaw for pointing me to this article. 14 On this point see L. Cebula, ‘An open letter to the historians of the 22nd century: Sorry for the stuff’, Slate, Culture box 22 July 2013. http://www.slate.com/ articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/how_will_historians_of_the_future_sort_through_ the_data_glut_of_the_present.html. (Accessed 7 May 2015). On the overflow of material and the (erotic) experience of researching a digital personal archive see also J. Ardam and J. Schmidt, ‘On excess: Susan Sonntag’s born-digital archive’, Los Angeles Review of Books: Magazine, Winter 2015, pp. 9e11.
Please cite this article in press as: de Chadarevian, S., The future historian: Reflections on the archives of contemporary sciences, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.08.004
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conversation ends with ‘drop me an email about this, will you?’ Thus the problem is not that there will be less material but how to preserve it and make it accessible. There might be a time interval where much electronic material has indeed been lost, but institutions are catching up. For instance, the Library of Congress as well as the British Library, together with other libraries in the UK and Ireland, have moved to systematically collect tweets and other publicly available online material. Legal frameworks have been developed to allow for thisdand we know that all our digital communications are captured anyway.15 Scientists like other actors will become more used to thinking about electronic mail as something that needs to be preserved like correspondence files. John Sulston who pioneered the use of electronic communication via bitnet in the collaborative effort that led to the first full genomic sequence of a multicellular organism, the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, has recognised this need early on and has preserved the digital records of this and later projects he was involved in, including especially the sequencing of the human genome.16 Furthermore, scientific data is already deposited in electronic data banks as part of the publication process. The move to make publicly funded science more widely available will help this trend. The secrecy rules surrounding private commercial interests in science may well turn out to pose a bigger threat to the pursuit of history of science in the future than the digital medium. Yet even in the context of commercial science there is an increased need for accurate documentation of the research process for priority disputes and patenting issues. Thus documents will be available but they will not become automatically accessible. The example points to the role of the legal sphere in the construction of archives. What other sources besides papers may a historian of contemporary science wish to find in the archives? 3. The thinginess of things As already mentioned, historians of science have developed an increasing interest in things. This trend developed out of a broader interest in the making of scientific knowledge and in studying science as an embodied, material activity. This interest led to a different mining of historical sources and a search for new sources. For historians trained in reading texts working with objects represents a challenge. However, an increasing number of history of science programmes, especially in departments that are historically closely linked with scientific instrument collections, offer opportunities to engage with material artefacts. For instance, the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University presents itself as an ‘experimental space’ that encourages museum curators, instrument makers, faculty and students to ‘meet in the production of object-based knowledge’. Similarly, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge offers students the opportunity to ‘work with objects’.17 The Science Museum Group in
15 E. Allen, ‘Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress’, January 4, 2013. Online at http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2013/01/update-on-the-twitter-archive-atthe-library-of-congress/ and J. Meilke, ‘British Library adds billions of webpages and tweets to archive’, The Guardian, 4 April 2013. Online at http://www. theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/british-library-archive-webpagestweets. (Accessed 7 May 2015). 16 On the early use of bitnet in the C. elegans mapping effort and the increasing digitalisation of the worm project see de Chadarevian (2005), p. 99 and GarcíaSancho (2012). Sulston’s complete archive is now deposited with the Wellcome Library and available online. 17 See ‘The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments mission statement’. http://chsi.harvard.edu/chsi_mission.html. (Accessed 24 July 2015) and Whipple Museum of the History of Science, ‘Teaching and research using museum collections’. http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/whipple/aboutthemuseum/teachingandresearch/ . (Accessed 8 May 2015).
Britain, including the Science Museum in London, the National Railway Museum, the National Media Museum and the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, has recently been awarded a grant for 24 fellowships over three years from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to support graduate students who work on museum-based projects. Students are supervised by museum staff, in close collaboration with academic partner institutions. With more historians of science being trained in such programmes, an international interest group, the so-called Artefacts Group, has been formed, which actively promotes the use of objects and museum collections in the study of science and technology.18 Historically, scientific artefacts have an even more precarious life than papers. Many objects come to museums in serendipitous ways and often very little if any information relating to their production and use is available. Yet various new initiatives are under way to systematically collect and describe things and equipment that form part of the research process. For instance, the Scientific Heritage project at Cambridge University has made an effort to define best practices in dealing with things such as laboratory equipment, instruments, models and more that scientists leave behind or discard to potentially preserve them for historical work (Jardine, 2013; Lourenço & Wilson, 2013). Also underway is a comprehensive effort to list all collections of objects used for teaching and research held in German universities with the aim of preserving them and open them up for historical research.19 It might seem ironic that historians of science become interested in things when the digital world threatens the disappearance of material artefacts. However, we should remember that although computers are ubiquitous and play a role in nearly every aspect of research, there are still a lot of other ‘things’ that surround scientists as they go about their work; fill shelves and laboratory benches; are stored in fridges; claim space, blink and hum in instrumentation rooms and corridors; are kept alive in Petri dishes and animal houses; and may even dominate city- and landscapes. Even when science seems to happen on the screen, it is fed and supplemented by material practices. For instance, digital databases in the biological and biomedical sciences are often accompanied by all too easily forgotten physical collections of frozen bodily fluids or tissue samples, the extraction and preparation of which is again highly physical.20 Computers themselves of course belong to the material artefacts of science. Nonetheless, some research practices have moved onto the screen. Molecular modelling is a case in point. Model rooms that were once stocked with modelling parts of all sorts and where scientists vied for space to build and tinker with physical models are now filled with rows of computers where scientists use software modelling tools to study molecular structures and their functions in silico. Intriguingly, the availability of 3Deprinters may change research practices again. More generally, the digital medium may help to bridge the traditional separation of things and text and can lead to a closer cooperation between archives (the traditional repositories of paper material) and museums that keep
18 See ‘Artefacts: using objects in studies of the history of science and technology’. http://www.artefactsconsortium.org/Index.htm. (Accessed 8 May 2015). 19 See ‘Universitätssammlungen in Deutschland: das Informationssytem zu Sammlungen und Museen an deutschen Universitäten’. http://www. universitaetssammlungen.de/. (Accessed 8 May 2015). For a description of the model project by project leader Cornelia Weber, see C. Weber, ‘Material models as recorders of academic communities: A new project on university collections in Germany’. http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/umacj/2011/weber-65/PDF/weber.pdf. (Accessed 8 May 2015). For efforts elsewhere and a wide-ranging discussion of questions of scientific heritage see Jardine & Wilson (2013). 20 For an example of the interface between physical objects, in this case plant seeds, and digital databases see Peres (in this issue).
Please cite this article in press as: de Chadarevian, S., The future historian: Reflections on the archives of contemporary sciences, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.08.004
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things (de Chadarevian, 2013). Yet before considering these possibilities we must at least briefly mention another kind of source of which contemporary historians can avail themselves, namely oral history interviews.
4. Interviews as sources Interviews have often been dismissed for providing gossip and distorted accounts of the past rather than reliable historical information. Many still see interviews at best as a way to get to paper records, including ephemeral sources like newsletters, conference programmes or internal memos (de Chadarevian, 1997).21 However, the historiographical interest in practices and craftlike aspects of scientific practices that are more difficult to reconstruct from written sources, combined with a stronger interest in recent history and the perception that much information that was traditionally available will be lost, has led to a proliferation of oral history programmes. These interviewing projects do specifically include technicians, museum curators and administrators rather than merely Nobel Prize winning scientists.22 Attempts to capture the history of complex institutions like drug companies or multisited collaborative projects that include many different players also often include oral history programmes. Another advantage of oral history interviews is that they can be integrated into digital platforms and bring history alive for broader publics. In this way oral history interviews participate in the shift from a written to what has been described as a ‘post-literate, [.] electronically oral and visual culture’ (Prins, 1991). There is among oral historians a lively discussion if the tape or the transcript represents the primary record of an interview. For some people the transcript represents but the ‘cadaver of speech’, a precarious attempt to capture a unique oral event in written form (McMahan, 1989, p. 107). They highlight the problem of ‘wrestling’ the flow of speech into a written text by imposing grammatical forms, paragraphs and punctuation (Good, 2006, p. 365). While some see a solution in the introduction of sociolinguistic features such as pitch, intonation and gestures into the transcript, others insist that ‘Expecting the transcript to replace the tape for scientific purposes is equivalent to doing art criticism from reproductions, or literary criticism on translations’ (Portelli, 2006, pp. 33e34). On the other end of the spectrum, people argue that the transcript is a rough draft that needs to be checked for accuracy and edited with help from the interviewee. This process may entail actual corrections or a series of annotations.23 Efforts to make interviews respectable historical sources that resemble traditional (archived) documents and don’t suffer from the distortions and inaccuracies that are seen to mar oral history interviews, have privileged the transcript including the editing process just mentioned. It is probably fair to say that historians of science often tend in that direction. Resisting this tendency it might be worthwhile for historians to consider in which way conducting an oral history interview
21 Historian Lillian Hoddeson who has made extensive use of oral history interviews in her work on the history of twentieth century physics noted that today ‘the objections to oral history, while often voiced, are rarely committed to print’ (Hoddeson, 2006), pp. 198, note 6. 22 See for instance Tansey (2008); also García-Sancho (in this issue). As an example of a recent oral history programme see ‘Museum lives’, an oral history project undertaken by the Natural History Museum in London to document the various aspects of work at the museum as well as the history of the institution; http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/science-facilities/cahr/projectspartnerships/museum-lives/about-the-project/index.html. (Accessed 8 May 2014). 23 On the usefulness of editing interviews intended for research purposes see for instance Hoddeson (2006), p. 194.
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differs from reading a text and how the actual encounter with the historical actor may enter our analysisdthis is for the cases when historians conduct their own interviews rather than relying on deposited interviews. Such an approach suggests that interviews, especially live interviews, are complex and rich interactions that require corresponding interpretative skills to be fully mined. Analysing these different dimensions that can range from gaining ‘a feel’ for the interviewee (Sheldon & Pappworth, 1983, p. 127) to building a relation of trust, is a challenge for historians trained in the study of texts. It may nonetheless provide a richer understanding of oral history interviews as historical sources. There remains the question if video recording would be the better medium to record interviews. Again, there is a spectrum of opinions. While some regard video recording as either too expensive for what it can add or too intrusive, others believe that video recording would be much superior, exactly because it would capture the tone of the voice, expressions, body movements and gestures that all carry messages. One commentator predicted that video-recording will ‘grow in value as our ability to interpret the whole range of human expressions improves in the future’.24 This pertains to the larger question of the role of audio-visual sources for the history of science (Loughlin, 2000). 5. The shape of future archives We have considered the challenges the rise of the digital medium poses to the traditional collecting activity of archives and museums. However, the digital medium also offers opportunities. Indeed, archivists have embraced digital technologies to enhance, preserve and make their paper holdings more widely available, leaving it to historians to mourn the disappearance of paper archives (Yee, 2007). Collaborative digitalisation projects may help to bring together parts of collections that are split up but really belong together and to bridge divisions between different kinds of repositories and sources, as for instance between paper records and collections of scientific objects.25 It may even revive nineteenthcentury aspirations of a ‘total archive’ that documents historical events in all media.26 Online archives can also encourage a more direct interaction between archivists and users through comment functions or blogs. Furthermore, the challenge produced by the pervasiveness of digitally-born sources and by changes in the organisation of
24 William Glen, ‘The suspicious life of oral data and science history,’ paper presented at the Working Conference on Interviews in Writing the History of Recent Science, convened by Horace Hudson and Thomas Söderqvist at Stanford, April 1994. In an interesting intervention on the subject, historian Michael Frisch has argued that the digitalisation of sound and image, including non-text reliant digital indexing and search mechanisms, will challenge the ‘dominance of transcription’ and return orality, and possibly visuality, to oral history (Frisch, 2006). 25 This vision has for instance been realised in the digitalisation project of the Board of Longitude papers. Undertaken by Cambridge Digital Library in collaboration with the National Maritime Museum and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, the online resource contains images of manuscripts held at Cambridge University Library with embedded hyperlinks to descriptions and images of objects held at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. See Cambridge Digital Library: Board of Longitude. http:// cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/longitude. (Accessed 16 August 2015). 26 See conference ‘The total archive: dreams of universal knowledge from the Encyclopaedia to big data’, CRASSH, Cambridge, March 2015. http://www.crassh. cam.ac.uk/events/25660. (Accessed 8 May 2015). The ‘Codebreakers’ project, hosted by the Wellcome Library on one common platform, provides an example of a digitalisation project that combines manuscript collections relating to the history of genetics from repositories in London, Cambridge, Glasgow and Cold Spring Harbor, NY; see “Codebreakers: Makers of modern genetics. Digitised archives’. http:// wellcomelibrary.org/collections/digital-collections/makers-of-modern-genetics/ digitised-archives/. (Accessed 8 May 2015).
Please cite this article in press as: de Chadarevian, S., The future historian: Reflections on the archives of contemporary sciences, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.08.004
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science, such as the rise of big multi-sited international team projects in the biological sciences, supported by an array of different bodies, has encouraged a reflection on collecting practices. The human genome project, consisting of several parallel projects, supported by public and private funds in various countries, is a case in point. According to figures presented by Mila Pollock, Director of Libraries and Archives at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory that also has a stake in the story, the project saw the involvement of 346 scientists, 229 institutions, and 97 technologies.27 The Human Genome Archive Project, supported by the Wellcome Trust, has taken up the challenge to consider how such a project could be meaningfully documented.28 The process has called for a closer interaction between archivists, scientists and historians, all of whom have a stake in the project, to imagine the archive of the future. The approach entails a more active role of archivists as well as historians in soliciting and collecting material (García-Sancho, in this issue; Shaw, in this issue). A pro-active attitude in respect to the acquisition of archival collections also has the advantage that papers may be deposited earlier on, when it is still possible to enlist the help of the authors with sorting the archive and with the explanation of technical matters. Summing up, it seems that despite the exponential growth of science and its networked character, future historians will be saved a lot of work as multiple archives will be linked (reflecting the networked structure of scientific work itself) and access will be possible from our own desks. Helped by digital archives, software tools and online communication they can also engage in collaborative projects with other historiansda move that many regard as necessary to deal with the complexity of recent science. However, as history has shown, what kind of records the future historian will be looking for can never quite be predicted and the very availability of the archive may well generate new interests that reach beyond what we can imagine now. Acknowledgements I thank Christine Aicardi, Richard Aspin and Jenny Shaw for inviting me to participate at the symposium ‘Making the History of the Postwar Life Sciences’ where this paper was first presented. References Balmer, B. (2012). Secrecy and science: A historical sociology of biological and chemical warfare. Franham: Ashgate Publishing. Catterall, P. (1997). What (if anything) is distinctive about contemporary history? Journal of Contemporary History, 32, 441e452. de Chadarevian, S. (1997). Using interviews for writing the history of science. In T. Söderqvist (Ed.), The historiography of contemporary science and technology (pp. 51e70). London: Harwood Academic Publishers. de Chadarevian, S. (2005). Mapping the worm’s genome: Tools, networks, patronage. In J.-P. Gaudillière, & H.-J. Rheinberger (Eds.), From molecular genetics to genomics: The mapping cultures of twentieth-century genetics (pp. 95e110). London and New York: Routledge. de Chadarevian, S. (2013). Things and the archives of recent sciences. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 44, 634e638. Daston, L. (2012). The sciences of the archive [Clio meets history: The challenges of history]. Osiris, 27, 156e187. Dennis, M. A. (2006). Secrecy and science revisited: From politics to historical practice and back. In R. E. Doel, & T. Söderqvist (Eds.), The historiography of contemporary science, technology, and medicine: Writing recent science (pp. 172e 184). New York: Routledge.
27 Mila Pollock, presentation at stakeholder meeting, Wellcome Trust, London, October 2012. 28 See Shaw (in this issue). Parallel efforts are undertaken by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US. For earlier efforts to develop ‘documentation strategies’ for capturing the relevant records of big science projects or of complex institutions like drug companies see Samuels (1993).
Doel, R. E., & Söderqvist, T. (Eds.). (2006). The historiography of contemporary science, technology, and medicine: Writing recent science. New York: Routledge. Fitzpatrick, A. (2006). From behind the fence: Threading the labyrinths of classified historical research. In R. E. Doel, & T. Söderqvist (Eds.), The historiography of contemporary science, technology, and medicine: Writing recent science (pp. 67e 80). New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (2003). The archaeology of knowledge. London: Routledge. Frisch, M. (2006). Oral history and the digital revolution: Towards a postdocumentary sensibility. In R. Perks, & A. Thomson (Eds.), The oral history reader (2nd ed.). (pp. 102e114) London and New York: Routledge. Galison, P. (2004). Removing knowledge. Critical Inquiry, 31, 229e243. García-Sancho, M. (2012). From the genetic to the computer program: The historicity of ‘data’ and ‘computation’ in the investigations on the nematode worm C. elegans. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 43, 16e28. García-Sancho, M. (2015). The proactive historian: Methodological opportunities around the new archival evidence on modern genomics. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (in this issue) Gaudillière, J. P. (2002). Inventer la biomédecine: la France, l’Amérique et la production des savoirs du vivant (1945e1965). Paris: Editions la Découverte. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., & Trow, M. (1994). The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. London: Sage. Golinski, J. (1998). Making natural knowledge: Constructivism and the history of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Good, F. (2006). Voice, ear and text: Words and meaning. In R. Perks, & A. Thomson (Eds.), The oral history reader (2nd ed.). (pp. 362e374) London and New York: Routledge. Gusterson, H. (1996). Nuclear rites: A weapons laboratory at the end of the cold war. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Harvey, M., & McMeekin, A. (2007). Private or public economies of knowledge? Turbulence in the biological sciences. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Hoddeson, L. (2006). The conflict of memories and documents: Dilemmas and pragmatics of oral history. In R. E. Doel, & T. Söderqvist (Eds.), The historiography of contemporary science, technology, and medicine: Writing recent science (pp. 187e200). New York: Routledge. Jardine, N. (2013). Reflections on the preservation of recent scientific heritage in dispersed university collections. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 44, 735e743. Jardine, N., & Wilson, L. (2013). Special section: Recent material heritage of the sciences. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 44, 632e753. Johnson, V. (2011). Plus ça change? The salutary tale of the telephone and its implications for archival thinking about the digital revolution. Journal of the Society of Archivists, 32(1), 79e92. Jordanova, L. (2012). The look of the past: Visual and material evidence in historical practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Larson, F. (2009). An infinity of things: How Sir Henry Wellcome collected the world. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Beverly Hills: Sage. Loughlin, K. (2000). The history of health and medicine in contemporary Britain: Reflections on the role of audio-visual sources. Social History of Medicine, 13, 131e145. Lourenço, M. C., & Wilson, L. (2013). Scientific heritage: Reflections on its nature and new approaches to preservation, study and access. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 44, 744e753. Masco, J. (2010). “Sensitive but unclassified”: Secrecy and the counterterrorist state. Public Culture, 22, 433e463. McMahan, E. M. (1989). Elite oral history discourse: A study of cooperation and coherence. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Müller-Wille, S., & Charmantier, I. (2012). Natural history and information overload: The case of Linnaeus. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 43, 4e15. Nowotny, H., Scott, P., & Gibbons, M. (2001). Rethinking science: Knowledge in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity. O’Toole, J. M. (2002). Cortes’s notary: The symbolic power of records. Archival Science, 2, 45e61. Peres, S. (2015). Saving the gene pool: genebanks as archives. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (in this issue). Portelli, A. (2006). What makes oral history different. In R. Perks, & A. Thomson (Eds.), The oral history reader (2nd ed.). (pp. 63e74) London and New York: Routledge. Prins, G. (1991). Oral history. In P. Burke (Ed.), New perspectives on historical writing (pp. 114e139). Cambridge: Polity Press. Russell, G. (1986). The Wellcome Historical Medical Museum’s dispersal of nonmedical material, 1936e1983. Museums Journal, 86 (Suppl.). Samuels, H. (1993). Documenting modern chemistry: The historical task of the archivist. In S. Mauskopf (Ed.), Chemical sciences in the modern world (pp. 237e 253). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Shaw, J. (2015). Documenting genomics: Applying archival theory to preserving the records of the Human Genome Project. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (in this issue) Sheldon, A., & Pappworth, J. (1983). By word of mouth: Elite oral history. London: Methuen.
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S. de Chadarevian / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences xxx (2015) 1e7 Smith, B. G. (1995). Gender and the practice of scientific history: The seminar and archival research in the nineteenth century. The American Historical Review, 100, 1150e1176. Söderqvist, T. (Ed.). (1997). The historiography of contemporary science and technology. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Tansey, E. M. (2008). Keeping the culture alive: The laboratory technician in midtwentieth-century British Medical Research. Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 62, 77e95.
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Thackray, A. (Ed.). (1998). Private science: Biotechnology and the rise of the molecular sciences. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wellerstein, A. (2010). Knowledge and the bomb: Nuclear secrecy in the US, 1938e 2008. Ph. D. Dissertation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Yee, S. (2007). The archive. In S. Turkle (Ed.), Evocative objects: Things we think with (pp. 30e36). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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The future historian: Reflections on the archives of contemporary sciences Soraya de Chadarevian* University of California Los Angeles, Department of History and Institute for Society and Genetics, 6265 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Available online xxx
Historians working on recent science work close to where the archives are created or become accessible. Based on this experience, the essay presents a reflection on the archives of contemporary life sciences. It addresses three questions: firstly, what is special about the archival situation of contemporary sciences? Secondly, which sources do contemporary historians use and what opportunities and challenges do they offer? And finally, what potential changes to the archives of contemporary sciences are we witnessing? The essay draws a distinction between, on the one side, the history of science when the actors are still aliveda situation that presents a particular set of issues in respect to the available sourcesdand, on the other side, questions relating specifically to the life sciences at the turn of the millenniumda period which will eventually not be considered as ’contemporary’ any more. It reviews changes in scientific practice, historiographical trends and archival practices and considers the place of paper records, digital sources, material artefacts and oral sources in the archives of contemporary sciences. It argues that the commercialisation and privatisation of science may prove a bigger problem for the future historian than the shift to the digital medium. It concludes by welcoming the closer interactions between scientists, historians, curators and archivists prompted by recent developments. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Contemporary science Archives Future historian Things Oral history interviews
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Some sources make a big splash. A recent example is the letter penned by Crick to his twelve-year old son Michael in May 1953 that described the structure of the DNA double helix before it appeared in print. The letter had been in private hand for sixty years, when his son decided to sell it. It fetched an unprecedented six million dollars, paid by an anonymous buyer. This was more than all the other Crick papers together that were acquired by the Wellcome Trust a decade earlier for what then seemed a very hefty price. The sale of the letter was widely reported in the media and although the original document is held in an undisclosed location, digital copies now pop up on countless internet sites. More usually, historical documents or sourcesdespecially if of the paper kinddlead a more discrete life. They are collected in boxes and line the shelves of archives. History depends on sources.
* Tel.: þ1 310 267 4767. E-mail address: [email protected].
Where there are no sources (of some kind) there is no history. The reverse: where there is no interest in history there are no archives also holds true, although not all collections of documents and things presuppose a future historian; they may be kept for legal, emotional or other reasonsdlike sheer inertiadand only eventually become sources for historical research. What stories historians write and what sources they use as well as the shape of archives and the kind of sources that are collected and kept changes over time. These changes depend on historiographical trends and changes in the historical subject matter as much as on shifts in archival collecting practices and the interests and meanings that sustain them. This sounds all rather obvious, but when we start thinking about these relations, they become increasingly complex, perhaps especially so in the history of science where the question of archives has only recently started gaining theoretical attention and where there remains a tension between the scientific enterprise that supposedly is all about the future and the historical enterprise that looks back
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.08.004 1369-8486/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: de Chadarevian, S., The future historian: Reflections on the archives of contemporary sciences, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.08.004
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in time.1 The meeting convened at the Wellcome Library that gathered historians, archivists and scientists and where the essays collected in this issue were first presented, offered a welcome occasion to think about these matters. My reflections are based on my experience as a historian working on recent science as well as on my participation in various archive related committees, including especially the advisory board of the now defunct National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists in Britain, where I was first introduced to many of the issues concerning scientific archives.2 Historians working on recent events work close to where records move from private hand to public repositories and at times they become themselves involved in the process by convincing scientists to deposit their papers or donate a piece of equipment to a museum rather than throw them out. As I have argued elsewhere, in this modest sense every recent historian is also a bit of an archivist (de Chadarevian, 2013). The essay is structured around three questions: firstly, what is special about the archival situation of contemporary sciences? Secondly, which sources do contemporary historians use and what opportunities and challenges do they offer? And finally, what potential changes to the archives of contemporary sciences are we witnessing? To tackle these questions the essay will review changes in scientific practice, historiographical trends and archival practices and consider the place of paper records, digital sources, material artefacts and oral sources in the archives of contemporary sciences. 1. What is special about contemporary science? There is a range of meanings for the term ‘contemporary history’. Some take it to mean ‘still in living memory’, so roughly the last eighty years. In a more narrow sense it may be understood as the shared memory of most of the adult population, hence extending to about thirty years. On other occasions the ‘contemporary’ stretches to the events that define the current era which can be a longer or shorter period.3 The first two definitions are most relevant for our concerns here. Writing history when the actors are still alive raises a set of particular issues regarding the availability of the access to sources. Many sources will still be held in private hand. If they are deposited, access will be restricted. At the same time, actors may be available for interviews and might provide access to sources that may not end up in an archive later. However, when we speak of contemporary science today, we may mean specifically science in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Eventually this period will not be considered ‘contemporary’ any more but some specific issues, like for instance the much broader adoption of the digital medium, may still define this period. I suggest that it is important to keep this distinction clearly in mind to avoid confusion.4 In the contemporary period, we have witnessed quite decisive changes in the sciences. When Bruno Latour visited a cutting edge biological laboratory in California in the early 1970s, he was struck by the obsession of the researchers with literary devices, mostly involving paper technologies (Latour & Woolgar, 1979). Were he to visit a laboratory today, he might be surprised by the fact that most
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For a critical perspective on this opposition and the ‘deep historicity’ of certain sciences linked to enormous archiving efforts see Daston (2012). The quote is on p. 162. 2 For a short description of the work of the National Cataloguing Unit see http:// archiveshub.ac.uk/contributors/ncuacs.html. (Accessed 7 May 2015). 3 See Catterall (1997); also entry ‘Contemporary history’ in Wikipedia, http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_history. (Accessed 7 May 2015). 4 On the historiographical challenges posed by the study of late twentieth century sciences, both in respect to specific features of the sciences in this period and in respect to writing recent history, see Söderqvist (1997) and Doel & Söderqvist (2006).
scientists stare at computer screensdmuch like the rest of the population does. The omnipresence of the computer is not the only change in the way science is conducted. The size of the enterprise has grown dramatically. Aided by new communication technologies, scientific projects, also in the biomedical sciences, are often conducted in large collaborative teams, distributed over many laboratories. The term biomedicine was created to denote a new assemblage of science, medicine and commercial developments (Gaudillière, 2002). Sociologists have described these changes as a transition from ‘mode 1’ to ‘mode 2’ science, a distinction that historians have criticised, although many would agree that major changes have taken place in the postwar period (Gibbons et al., 1994; Nowotny, Scott, & Gibbons, 2001). The commercialisation of science as well as the expansion of secret military science have important implications for the availability of archival sources. The historian Peter Galison has exposed the staggering amount of classified material that is being produced in the US alone (an estimated five to ten times more than what is openly available), the extravagant efforts that are invested in keeping it secret and the damaging effects secrecy has on knowledge production and democracy (Galison, 2004).5 Company archives are routinely closed, while the distinctions between private and public sector science are increasingly blurred.6 At the same time, history of sciencedfollowing Latour and othersdunderwent a historiographical transformation, often described as practice turn or cultural turn. It resulted in an increased interest in the production of scientific knowledge and the material and social practices that sustain it.7 The changes in the way the sciences are conducted as well as in the historiography of the sciences have an impact on what kind of materials scientists leave behind, which material finds its way into the archivesdoften a highly serendipitous process that in any case only captures a very small fraction of the potential source materialdand what kind of sources historians look for. These changes do not always go step in step. Scientific archives themselves have seen major changes, partly in response to the developments just described. Another example is the commercialisation of some scientific archives, most notably those of Nobel Prize winning molecular biologists. The price tag involved for acquiring such collections is forcing repositories to re-think their acquisition policies, to collaborate with other archives and overall to adopt a more pro-active attitude (Shaw, in this issue). A closer consideration of the different kinds of sources historians of contemporary sciences may be using will provide further insight into the changing nature of scientific archives.
2. Paper archives Historians, including historians of science, generally feel most at home in paper archives and visiting an archive belongs to the initiation rites of becoming a historian. The term ‘archive’ without any further qualification generally means ‘paper archive’ although of course there are all kinds of other archives, such as picture, film and oral history archives.
5 Galison and others have made clear that the problem with secret science, both commercial and military, is not just a question of access to classified material but of the effects of secrecy regimes on the content and the role of knowledge itself; see for instance Gusterson (1996), Dennis (2006), Masco (2010), Wellerstein (2010) and Balmer (2012). For a first-hand account of the experience of working with security clearance in a government archive with classified scientific material see Fitzpatrick (2006). 6 On the increasing privatisation especially of the biomedical sciences and the growing interdependence of ‘private’ and ‘public’ domains see, among others, Thackray (1998) and Harvey & McMeekin (2007). 7 For a general introduction to this historiographical shift see Golinski (1998).
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Nevertheless, archive-based history is a surprisingly recent invention; the new historiographical trend, based on the critical reading of sources, originated in nineteenth-century Germany.8 It went hand in hand with a historical interest in large-scale political events like the formation of states and nations and the creation of legal systems that was (and could be) based exclusively on the study of archival documentary sources, including especially administrative papers that were being amassed by various institutions for legal reasons. As these brief remarks indicate, archives are created according to established practices and institutional logics that constrict and discipline as much as they facilitate historical research (Foucault, 2003). To take a rather harmless example, we are used to a subdivision into institutional and personal archives as well as to the separation of paper records from other types of records. Photographs are kept in special boxes (also for preservation issues). I remember the surprise effect when I once came across some pieces of colourful material in a box of papers in the Manuscript Division of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. They were tissue samples with crystal pattern designs tacked to a letter by the manufacturer addressed to one of the crystallographers involved in supplying the original patterns to help him choose the material for a tie he had ordered. Probably, the fact that the samples were stapled to the letter saved them from being separated from the paper records as un-stapling them would have damaged the letter. In fact, scientists often collect some scientific paraphernalia among their papers. In rare cases these are kept as part of the archival collections. This can produce some headaches to archivist. Recently I ordered a box, promisingly labelled: ‘Model’ from a provisional list of papers by molecular biologist Aaron Klug that were newly acquired by Churchill College in Cambridge. A box of unusual dimensions was placed on my table. Inside the box was a 3D model, about 80 cm long and 25 cm wide. There was no description accompanying the model. Such a description may follow once the collection is catalogued. Nevertheless, the archivist proudly pointed to the clever work of his colleagues that had fabricated the box to archive the model. Yet despite the artfully constructed archive box, the model looked strangely out of place. The reason for paper archives to occasionally accept objects in their collections is not primarily because of their value as sources but because they look good on displays. For instance, the same archive that took in Klug’s model also keeps Thatcher’s handbag about which historian Ludmilla Jordanova has so eloquently written (Jordanova, 2012; pp. xxexxii). More generally, archivists insist that objects do not have a proper place in archives, that they do not possess the skills or the space to preserve them, and that the objects are more properly housed in science museums.9
8 On the rise of the historical seminar and the practice of archival history see Smith (1995). 9 For examples of this stance see de Chadarevian (2013), p. 636. The fate of Henry Wellcome’s collection further illustrates the point. Wellcome, like other turn-ofthe-twentieth-century collectors, acquired both papers and objects documenting medical practices around the globe. However, after his death his collection was first consolidated and then split up with text sources being kept in the Wellcome Library and Archives and the objects auctioned off, donated or given on permanent loan to museums around the world. Important recipients for non-medical objects were the British Museum as well as the Fowler Museum at the University of California Los Angeles that in the mid-1960s received 30 000 objects which form the core of its African and Pacific ethnographic holdings; see Fowler Museum, Overview of collections. http://fowler.ucla.edu/collections. (Accessed 7 May 2015). The Science Museum in London received the bulk of the medical objects. Today the ‘Wellcome Collections’ in the Wellcome building include the library and archives and a space for temporary exhibitions but the main artefact holdings remain at the Science Museum. On Wellcome’s collecting practices and the history of his collection see Russell (1986) and Larson (2009). The first title includes a full list of all the museums that received material from Henry Wellcome’s original collection. I thank Julia Sheppard for essential feedback on this issue.
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I mention things because with the ‘practice turn’ historians of science have developed a keen interest in things such as instruments, models, teaching materials and more as sources for their investigations. However, the lack of things is not the only challenge contemporary historians encounter in archives. More often than not, the papers they may be interested in have not yet been deposited or have not been catalogued. This last problem is not unique to archives of contemporary sciences but it is more likely to happen with recent paper acquisitions. At times historians get access to filing cabinets, files and boxes of archival material before they are deposited. As exciting as this may be the more frustrating it can become to find the relevant file references when the material eventually gets archived and catalogued. Theoretically it should be possible to track every file but in practice the process can be very troublesome. Some documents can never be found again. Nevertheless, these are situations historians and archivists are more or less used to deal with. The move of much of science and of scientific communication to a digital format poses a different and arguably more serious challenge to archive-based history. Some have painted this as the end of the archive and of history as we know it.10 It is certainly true that ‘digitally born’ material poses special problems for archival preservation because of its ephemeral nature and because of the fast pace with which computer soft- and hardware become obsolete. An additional problem (although perhaps also part of the solution) is to determine what ‘the original’ is as every document exists in multiple copies.11 However, archivists have been thinking about these issues for a while. They share these problems with scientists who rely on historical data, like for instance astronomers, and with other institutions, and they are increasingly confident that solutions will or are being found.12 Archival techniques will change. Archivists and possibly historians will need to become skilled in the use of old software programs or forward conversion routines to retrieve historic source material. Yet as archive based history has survived the invention of the telephone, we can confidently predict that it will survive the invention of digital communications.13 Indeed, in many ways more communication acts leave tangible traces.14 People, including scientists, are incessantly emailing, blogging and tweeting. People write emails rather than using the phone or talking to colleagues and increasingly it is the case that a
10 For references to the ‘digital dark ages’ see R. Harvey, ‘So where’s the black hole in our collective memory? A provocative position paper’, Digital preservation Europe, 2008. https://web.archive.org/web/20110413110146/http://www. digitalpreservationeurope.eu/publications/position/Ross_Harvey_black_hole_PPP. pdf. (Accessed 24 July 2015) as well as O’Toole (2002), pp. 58e59. 11 A problem often mentioned in this context is that of the ‘data deluge’ that supposedly characterises recent science and is exasperated by the digital medium. However, historical studies suggest that earlier generations of scientists, and presumably archivists, equally struggled with an overflow of information. Ironically, and not unlike in the current situation, the same scientists who suffered from the information deluge contributed to its further expansion by providing the tools to maintain it. For an excellent exposition of this point see Müller-Wille & Charmantier (2012). 12 On the archival efforts of astronomers and other ‘sciences of the archive’ see Daston (2012). 13 On the archival and record keeping response to the introduction of the telephone see Johnson (2011). As Johnson acknowledges, this is an area that deserves further investigation. I thank Jenny Shaw for pointing me to this article. 14 On this point see L. Cebula, ‘An open letter to the historians of the 22nd century: Sorry for the stuff’, Slate, Culture box 22 July 2013. http://www.slate.com/ articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/how_will_historians_of_the_future_sort_through_ the_data_glut_of_the_present.html. (Accessed 7 May 2015). On the overflow of material and the (erotic) experience of researching a digital personal archive see also J. Ardam and J. Schmidt, ‘On excess: Susan Sonntag’s born-digital archive’, Los Angeles Review of Books: Magazine, Winter 2015, pp. 9e11.
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conversation ends with ‘drop me an email about this, will you?’ Thus the problem is not that there will be less material but how to preserve it and make it accessible. There might be a time interval where much electronic material has indeed been lost, but institutions are catching up. For instance, the Library of Congress as well as the British Library, together with other libraries in the UK and Ireland, have moved to systematically collect tweets and other publicly available online material. Legal frameworks have been developed to allow for thisdand we know that all our digital communications are captured anyway.15 Scientists like other actors will become more used to thinking about electronic mail as something that needs to be preserved like correspondence files. John Sulston who pioneered the use of electronic communication via bitnet in the collaborative effort that led to the first full genomic sequence of a multicellular organism, the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, has recognised this need early on and has preserved the digital records of this and later projects he was involved in, including especially the sequencing of the human genome.16 Furthermore, scientific data is already deposited in electronic data banks as part of the publication process. The move to make publicly funded science more widely available will help this trend. The secrecy rules surrounding private commercial interests in science may well turn out to pose a bigger threat to the pursuit of history of science in the future than the digital medium. Yet even in the context of commercial science there is an increased need for accurate documentation of the research process for priority disputes and patenting issues. Thus documents will be available but they will not become automatically accessible. The example points to the role of the legal sphere in the construction of archives. What other sources besides papers may a historian of contemporary science wish to find in the archives? 3. The thinginess of things As already mentioned, historians of science have developed an increasing interest in things. This trend developed out of a broader interest in the making of scientific knowledge and in studying science as an embodied, material activity. This interest led to a different mining of historical sources and a search for new sources. For historians trained in reading texts working with objects represents a challenge. However, an increasing number of history of science programmes, especially in departments that are historically closely linked with scientific instrument collections, offer opportunities to engage with material artefacts. For instance, the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University presents itself as an ‘experimental space’ that encourages museum curators, instrument makers, faculty and students to ‘meet in the production of object-based knowledge’. Similarly, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge offers students the opportunity to ‘work with objects’.17 The Science Museum Group in
15 E. Allen, ‘Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress’, January 4, 2013. Online at http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2013/01/update-on-the-twitter-archive-atthe-library-of-congress/ and J. Meilke, ‘British Library adds billions of webpages and tweets to archive’, The Guardian, 4 April 2013. Online at http://www. theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/british-library-archive-webpagestweets. (Accessed 7 May 2015). 16 On the early use of bitnet in the C. elegans mapping effort and the increasing digitalisation of the worm project see de Chadarevian (2005), p. 99 and GarcíaSancho (2012). Sulston’s complete archive is now deposited with the Wellcome Library and available online. 17 See ‘The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments mission statement’. http://chsi.harvard.edu/chsi_mission.html. (Accessed 24 July 2015) and Whipple Museum of the History of Science, ‘Teaching and research using museum collections’. http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/whipple/aboutthemuseum/teachingandresearch/ . (Accessed 8 May 2015).
Britain, including the Science Museum in London, the National Railway Museum, the National Media Museum and the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, has recently been awarded a grant for 24 fellowships over three years from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to support graduate students who work on museum-based projects. Students are supervised by museum staff, in close collaboration with academic partner institutions. With more historians of science being trained in such programmes, an international interest group, the so-called Artefacts Group, has been formed, which actively promotes the use of objects and museum collections in the study of science and technology.18 Historically, scientific artefacts have an even more precarious life than papers. Many objects come to museums in serendipitous ways and often very little if any information relating to their production and use is available. Yet various new initiatives are under way to systematically collect and describe things and equipment that form part of the research process. For instance, the Scientific Heritage project at Cambridge University has made an effort to define best practices in dealing with things such as laboratory equipment, instruments, models and more that scientists leave behind or discard to potentially preserve them for historical work (Jardine, 2013; Lourenço & Wilson, 2013). Also underway is a comprehensive effort to list all collections of objects used for teaching and research held in German universities with the aim of preserving them and open them up for historical research.19 It might seem ironic that historians of science become interested in things when the digital world threatens the disappearance of material artefacts. However, we should remember that although computers are ubiquitous and play a role in nearly every aspect of research, there are still a lot of other ‘things’ that surround scientists as they go about their work; fill shelves and laboratory benches; are stored in fridges; claim space, blink and hum in instrumentation rooms and corridors; are kept alive in Petri dishes and animal houses; and may even dominate city- and landscapes. Even when science seems to happen on the screen, it is fed and supplemented by material practices. For instance, digital databases in the biological and biomedical sciences are often accompanied by all too easily forgotten physical collections of frozen bodily fluids or tissue samples, the extraction and preparation of which is again highly physical.20 Computers themselves of course belong to the material artefacts of science. Nonetheless, some research practices have moved onto the screen. Molecular modelling is a case in point. Model rooms that were once stocked with modelling parts of all sorts and where scientists vied for space to build and tinker with physical models are now filled with rows of computers where scientists use software modelling tools to study molecular structures and their functions in silico. Intriguingly, the availability of 3Deprinters may change research practices again. More generally, the digital medium may help to bridge the traditional separation of things and text and can lead to a closer cooperation between archives (the traditional repositories of paper material) and museums that keep
18 See ‘Artefacts: using objects in studies of the history of science and technology’. http://www.artefactsconsortium.org/Index.htm. (Accessed 8 May 2015). 19 See ‘Universitätssammlungen in Deutschland: das Informationssytem zu Sammlungen und Museen an deutschen Universitäten’. http://www. universitaetssammlungen.de/. (Accessed 8 May 2015). For a description of the model project by project leader Cornelia Weber, see C. Weber, ‘Material models as recorders of academic communities: A new project on university collections in Germany’. http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/umacj/2011/weber-65/PDF/weber.pdf. (Accessed 8 May 2015). For efforts elsewhere and a wide-ranging discussion of questions of scientific heritage see Jardine & Wilson (2013). 20 For an example of the interface between physical objects, in this case plant seeds, and digital databases see Peres (in this issue).
Please cite this article in press as: de Chadarevian, S., The future historian: Reflections on the archives of contemporary sciences, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.08.004
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things (de Chadarevian, 2013). Yet before considering these possibilities we must at least briefly mention another kind of source of which contemporary historians can avail themselves, namely oral history interviews.
4. Interviews as sources Interviews have often been dismissed for providing gossip and distorted accounts of the past rather than reliable historical information. Many still see interviews at best as a way to get to paper records, including ephemeral sources like newsletters, conference programmes or internal memos (de Chadarevian, 1997).21 However, the historiographical interest in practices and craftlike aspects of scientific practices that are more difficult to reconstruct from written sources, combined with a stronger interest in recent history and the perception that much information that was traditionally available will be lost, has led to a proliferation of oral history programmes. These interviewing projects do specifically include technicians, museum curators and administrators rather than merely Nobel Prize winning scientists.22 Attempts to capture the history of complex institutions like drug companies or multisited collaborative projects that include many different players also often include oral history programmes. Another advantage of oral history interviews is that they can be integrated into digital platforms and bring history alive for broader publics. In this way oral history interviews participate in the shift from a written to what has been described as a ‘post-literate, [.] electronically oral and visual culture’ (Prins, 1991). There is among oral historians a lively discussion if the tape or the transcript represents the primary record of an interview. For some people the transcript represents but the ‘cadaver of speech’, a precarious attempt to capture a unique oral event in written form (McMahan, 1989, p. 107). They highlight the problem of ‘wrestling’ the flow of speech into a written text by imposing grammatical forms, paragraphs and punctuation (Good, 2006, p. 365). While some see a solution in the introduction of sociolinguistic features such as pitch, intonation and gestures into the transcript, others insist that ‘Expecting the transcript to replace the tape for scientific purposes is equivalent to doing art criticism from reproductions, or literary criticism on translations’ (Portelli, 2006, pp. 33e34). On the other end of the spectrum, people argue that the transcript is a rough draft that needs to be checked for accuracy and edited with help from the interviewee. This process may entail actual corrections or a series of annotations.23 Efforts to make interviews respectable historical sources that resemble traditional (archived) documents and don’t suffer from the distortions and inaccuracies that are seen to mar oral history interviews, have privileged the transcript including the editing process just mentioned. It is probably fair to say that historians of science often tend in that direction. Resisting this tendency it might be worthwhile for historians to consider in which way conducting an oral history interview
21 Historian Lillian Hoddeson who has made extensive use of oral history interviews in her work on the history of twentieth century physics noted that today ‘the objections to oral history, while often voiced, are rarely committed to print’ (Hoddeson, 2006), pp. 198, note 6. 22 See for instance Tansey (2008); also García-Sancho (in this issue). As an example of a recent oral history programme see ‘Museum lives’, an oral history project undertaken by the Natural History Museum in London to document the various aspects of work at the museum as well as the history of the institution; http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/science-facilities/cahr/projectspartnerships/museum-lives/about-the-project/index.html. (Accessed 8 May 2014). 23 On the usefulness of editing interviews intended for research purposes see for instance Hoddeson (2006), p. 194.
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differs from reading a text and how the actual encounter with the historical actor may enter our analysisdthis is for the cases when historians conduct their own interviews rather than relying on deposited interviews. Such an approach suggests that interviews, especially live interviews, are complex and rich interactions that require corresponding interpretative skills to be fully mined. Analysing these different dimensions that can range from gaining ‘a feel’ for the interviewee (Sheldon & Pappworth, 1983, p. 127) to building a relation of trust, is a challenge for historians trained in the study of texts. It may nonetheless provide a richer understanding of oral history interviews as historical sources. There remains the question if video recording would be the better medium to record interviews. Again, there is a spectrum of opinions. While some regard video recording as either too expensive for what it can add or too intrusive, others believe that video recording would be much superior, exactly because it would capture the tone of the voice, expressions, body movements and gestures that all carry messages. One commentator predicted that video-recording will ‘grow in value as our ability to interpret the whole range of human expressions improves in the future’.24 This pertains to the larger question of the role of audio-visual sources for the history of science (Loughlin, 2000). 5. The shape of future archives We have considered the challenges the rise of the digital medium poses to the traditional collecting activity of archives and museums. However, the digital medium also offers opportunities. Indeed, archivists have embraced digital technologies to enhance, preserve and make their paper holdings more widely available, leaving it to historians to mourn the disappearance of paper archives (Yee, 2007). Collaborative digitalisation projects may help to bring together parts of collections that are split up but really belong together and to bridge divisions between different kinds of repositories and sources, as for instance between paper records and collections of scientific objects.25 It may even revive nineteenthcentury aspirations of a ‘total archive’ that documents historical events in all media.26 Online archives can also encourage a more direct interaction between archivists and users through comment functions or blogs. Furthermore, the challenge produced by the pervasiveness of digitally-born sources and by changes in the organisation of
24 William Glen, ‘The suspicious life of oral data and science history,’ paper presented at the Working Conference on Interviews in Writing the History of Recent Science, convened by Horace Hudson and Thomas Söderqvist at Stanford, April 1994. In an interesting intervention on the subject, historian Michael Frisch has argued that the digitalisation of sound and image, including non-text reliant digital indexing and search mechanisms, will challenge the ‘dominance of transcription’ and return orality, and possibly visuality, to oral history (Frisch, 2006). 25 This vision has for instance been realised in the digitalisation project of the Board of Longitude papers. Undertaken by Cambridge Digital Library in collaboration with the National Maritime Museum and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, the online resource contains images of manuscripts held at Cambridge University Library with embedded hyperlinks to descriptions and images of objects held at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. See Cambridge Digital Library: Board of Longitude. http:// cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/longitude. (Accessed 16 August 2015). 26 See conference ‘The total archive: dreams of universal knowledge from the Encyclopaedia to big data’, CRASSH, Cambridge, March 2015. http://www.crassh. cam.ac.uk/events/25660. (Accessed 8 May 2015). The ‘Codebreakers’ project, hosted by the Wellcome Library on one common platform, provides an example of a digitalisation project that combines manuscript collections relating to the history of genetics from repositories in London, Cambridge, Glasgow and Cold Spring Harbor, NY; see “Codebreakers: Makers of modern genetics. Digitised archives’. http:// wellcomelibrary.org/collections/digital-collections/makers-of-modern-genetics/ digitised-archives/. (Accessed 8 May 2015).
Please cite this article in press as: de Chadarevian, S., The future historian: Reflections on the archives of contemporary sciences, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.08.004
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science, such as the rise of big multi-sited international team projects in the biological sciences, supported by an array of different bodies, has encouraged a reflection on collecting practices. The human genome project, consisting of several parallel projects, supported by public and private funds in various countries, is a case in point. According to figures presented by Mila Pollock, Director of Libraries and Archives at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory that also has a stake in the story, the project saw the involvement of 346 scientists, 229 institutions, and 97 technologies.27 The Human Genome Archive Project, supported by the Wellcome Trust, has taken up the challenge to consider how such a project could be meaningfully documented.28 The process has called for a closer interaction between archivists, scientists and historians, all of whom have a stake in the project, to imagine the archive of the future. The approach entails a more active role of archivists as well as historians in soliciting and collecting material (García-Sancho, in this issue; Shaw, in this issue). A pro-active attitude in respect to the acquisition of archival collections also has the advantage that papers may be deposited earlier on, when it is still possible to enlist the help of the authors with sorting the archive and with the explanation of technical matters. Summing up, it seems that despite the exponential growth of science and its networked character, future historians will be saved a lot of work as multiple archives will be linked (reflecting the networked structure of scientific work itself) and access will be possible from our own desks. Helped by digital archives, software tools and online communication they can also engage in collaborative projects with other historiansda move that many regard as necessary to deal with the complexity of recent science. However, as history has shown, what kind of records the future historian will be looking for can never quite be predicted and the very availability of the archive may well generate new interests that reach beyond what we can imagine now. Acknowledgements I thank Christine Aicardi, Richard Aspin and Jenny Shaw for inviting me to participate at the symposium ‘Making the History of the Postwar Life Sciences’ where this paper was first presented. References Balmer, B. (2012). Secrecy and science: A historical sociology of biological and chemical warfare. Franham: Ashgate Publishing. Catterall, P. (1997). What (if anything) is distinctive about contemporary history? Journal of Contemporary History, 32, 441e452. de Chadarevian, S. (1997). Using interviews for writing the history of science. In T. Söderqvist (Ed.), The historiography of contemporary science and technology (pp. 51e70). London: Harwood Academic Publishers. de Chadarevian, S. (2005). Mapping the worm’s genome: Tools, networks, patronage. In J.-P. Gaudillière, & H.-J. Rheinberger (Eds.), From molecular genetics to genomics: The mapping cultures of twentieth-century genetics (pp. 95e110). London and New York: Routledge. de Chadarevian, S. (2013). Things and the archives of recent sciences. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 44, 634e638. Daston, L. (2012). The sciences of the archive [Clio meets history: The challenges of history]. Osiris, 27, 156e187. Dennis, M. A. (2006). Secrecy and science revisited: From politics to historical practice and back. In R. E. Doel, & T. Söderqvist (Eds.), The historiography of contemporary science, technology, and medicine: Writing recent science (pp. 172e 184). New York: Routledge.
27 Mila Pollock, presentation at stakeholder meeting, Wellcome Trust, London, October 2012. 28 See Shaw (in this issue). Parallel efforts are undertaken by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US. For earlier efforts to develop ‘documentation strategies’ for capturing the relevant records of big science projects or of complex institutions like drug companies see Samuels (1993).
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Please cite this article in press as: de Chadarevian, S., The future historian: Reflections on the archives of contemporary sciences, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.08.004