ATTENTION, location change. The meeting will not take place in the usual Salle Ladrière, but on the Salle du Conseil PSP, room number a.224 (right on top of Salle Ladrière).
Series: HPS
Speaker: Charles H. Pence (UCLouvain)
Title: “The HPS ‘Long View’ and the Case of the Journal Article”
Abstract
It is tempting to regard the “record” of journal articles as a temporally and culturally stable artifact that could permit sweeping, comparative historical analyses of a particularly powerful sort – just the kind of thing that could be used to ground generalizations in HPS. All the more since some still-extant journals, like Nature or the Proceedings of the Royal Society, reach back to cover significant periods of the nineteenth century (having been founded in 1869 and 1831, respectively). Setting aside worries about pretensions to completeness (as could be attested by anyone who has ever attempted to download the “complete” catalog of even a relatively recent journal), I want to pursue the question of the “journal record” through a combination of historical and practical approaches in this talk. Humanistic analyses of “the literature” need to not only wrestle with its syntactic content, and with the difficulties of moving from syntax to semantics, but, if such an analysis is to be in the slightest a historical endeavor, it needs also to deal with the epistemic, social, and cultural contexts of journal article production. I will describe these worries in theory, then demonstrate them in practice, presenting some in-progress work on the reception of statistics in Britain in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
