What is a Scientific Author? (2013)

WHAT IS A SCIENTIFIC AUTHOR?

Cultures of Scientific Publishing

Friday, 10 May 2013

Barker Center, 133, Harvard University

Sponsored by the Seminar in the History of the Book

of the Mahindra Humanities Center

Guest commentator

Elizabeth Eisenstein

RSVP: mfelton@fas.harvard.edu

8:30-9:00

Welcome, coffee, snacks

9:00-9:10

Welcoming remarks: Marie-Claude Felton

9:10-10:55

Chair: Ann Blair (History, Harvard University)

Vera Keller (University of Oregon)

Authors of the Unknown: From Visible Systems to the Research Niche

Richard J. Oosterhoff (Notre Dame)

Authorship, Community, and Method in Renaissance Mathematics: The Case of Early Printed Textbooks at Paris

Hannah Murphy (University of California, Berkeley)

Authorship, Correspondence and Consensus in Early Modern Botanical Observations

10:55-11:10

Coffee break

11:10-12:20

Chair: Caroline Duroselle-Melish (Houghton Library, Harvard University)

Elizabeth Yale (Western Carolina University)

Crafting the “Great Father of the Botanick Science”: John Ray and Authorship after Death in the Eighteenth Century

Daniel Margocsy (Hunter College – CUNY)

The Emergence of the Scientific Ghostwriter: Forging Albertus Seba’s Thesaurus

12:20-2:00

Lunch

Visit to the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments

with Sara Schechner (David P. Wheatland Curator)

2:00-3:45

Chair: Matthew Battles (metaLAB (at) Harvard)

Cindy Stelmackowich (Dalhousie University / University of King’s College)

The Order of Bodies and the Order of Books: Nineteenth-Century Anatomical Atlases, Authorship and Scientific Publishing

Sylvia Nickerson (University of Toronto)

Paper Index of the Mind: The Printed Culture of Mathematics in Victorian England

Simon Frost (Bournemouth University)

Economising in Public: Publishing History as a Challenge to Scientific Method

3:45-4:00

Coffee Break

4:00-5:15

Chair: Alex Csiszar (History of Science, Harvard University)

Geoffrey Belknap (Harvard University)

Reproducing Images, Producing Authority? Photography, the Press, and Popular Science in the 1874 Transit of Venus Enterprise

Melinda Baldwin (Academy of Arts & Sciences)

Credibility, Peer Review, and the Laissez-faire Era of Nature, 1939-1966

5:15-6:15

Commentary and General discussion

Organized by

Marie-Claude Felton mfelton@fas.harvard.edu

Alex Csiszar acsiszar@fas.harvard.edu

Ann Blair amblair@fas.harvard.edu

Attendance is free and open to the public (space limited). Papers are pre-circulated (though speakers will also give short presentations). Please RSVP tomfelton@fas.harvard.edu