Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 55 (2016) 54e60
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and
Biomedical Sciences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc
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 12 September 2015
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].
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.08.004
1369-8486/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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
S. de Chadarevian / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 55 (2016) 54e60
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
1
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).
55
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, 2016). 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).
56
S. de Chadarevian / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 55 (2016) 54e60
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.
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.
S. de Chadarevian / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 55 (2016) 54e60
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).
57
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 (2016).
58
S. de Chadarevian / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 55 (2016) 54e60
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 (2016). 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/projects-partnerships/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.
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).
S. de Chadarevian / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 55 (2016) 54e60
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,
2016; Shaw, 2016). 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.
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