IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB617165915

The proactive historian: Methodological opportunities presented by the new archives documenting genomics (2016)

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Volume: 55
Pages: 70-82

DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.09.005

URI: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848615001314

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Digital humanities Big science Big data Historical method History of science, as a discipline Libraries and archives Genomics 20th century, late 21st century

In this paper, I propose a strategy for navigating newly available archives in the study of late-twentieth century genomics. I demonstrate that the alleged ‘explosion of data’ characteristic of genomics—and of contemporary science in general—is not a new problem and that historians of earlier periods have dealt with information overload by relying on the ‘perspective of time’: the filtering effect the passage of time naturally exerts on both sources and memories. I argue that this reliance on the selective capacity of time results in inheriting archives curated by others and, consequently, poses the risk of reifying ahistorical scientific discourses. Through a preliminary examination of archives documenting early attempts at mapping and sequencing the human genome, I propose an alternative approach, in which historians proactively problematize and improve available sources. This approach provides historians with a voice in the socio-political management of scientific heritage and advances methodological innovations in the use of oral histories. It also provides a narrative framework in which to address big science initiatives by following second order administrators, rather than individual scientists. The new genomic archives thus represent an opportunity for historians to take an active role in current debates concerning ‘big data’ and critically embed the humanities in pressing global problems.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB617165915/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Robert Bud; (2016)
Representing scale: What should be special about the heritage of mass science? (/isis/citation/CBB100969947/)

Article Soraya de Chadarevian; (2016)
The future historian: Reflections on the archives of contemporary sciences (/isis/citation/CBB898245006/)

Book Colin Koopman; (2019)
How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person (/isis/citation/CBB981384434/)

Article Chow-White, Peter A.; García-Sancho, Miguel; (2012)
Bidirectional Shaping and Spaces of Convergence: Interactions between Biology and Computing from the First DNA Sequencers to Global Genome Databases (/isis/citation/CBB001250230/)

Article Francesco Beretta; (2016)
Pour une annotation sémantique des textes: le projet symogih.org et la Text encoding initiative (/isis/citation/CBB744237198/)

Book Richard Rogers; (2013)
Digital Methods (/isis/citation/CBB308365219/)

Book Marek Tamm; Peter Burke; (2018)
Debating New Approaches to History (/isis/citation/CBB400076497/)

Article Martin Gorsky; (2015)
Into the Dark Domain: The UK Web Archive as a Source for the Contemporary History of Public Health (/isis/citation/CBB666065307/)

Article Rhodri Leng; Gil Viry; Miguel García-Sancho; James Lowe; Mark Wong; Niki Vermeulen; (2022)
The Sequences and the Sequencers: What Can a Mixed-Methods Approach Reveal about the History of Genomics? (/isis/citation/CBB457018901/)

Thesis Dunn, Rhonda Thayer; (2011)
Designing a Griotte for the Global Village: Increasing the Evidentiary Value of Oral Histories for Use in Digital Libraries (/isis/citation/CBB001567311/)

Article Joachim L. Dagg; (2019)
Motives and merits of counterfactual histories of science (/isis/citation/CBB710171767/)

Article Jeffrey I. Seeman; (2022)
Remote Interviewing and the History of Chemistry (/isis/citation/CBB903379745/)

Article David Rabouin; Anne-Lise Rey; (2022)
La science classique dans la Revue d’histoire des sciences (/isis/citation/CBB509066510/)

Article Duan, Lian; (2011)
Museums of Natural Science and Technology and Oral History (/isis/citation/CBB001221318/)

Article Paul Merchant; (2019)
What Oral Historians and Historians of Science Can Learn from Each Other (/isis/citation/CBB829034696/)

Article Wang, Yangzong; (2011)
The Chinese Way in Science and the Oral History of Modern Science in China (/isis/citation/CBB001221315/)

Article Stéphane Tirard; (2022)
L’histoire de l’histoire naturelle et de l’évolutionnisme dans la Revue d’histoire des sciences (/isis/citation/CBB014960563/)

Article Hu, Zonggang; (2011)
Tong Te-Kong and Oral History of Science Works (/isis/citation/CBB001221317/)

Article Michael Buchner; Tobias A. Jopp; Mark Spoerer; Lino Wehrheim; (2020)
Zur Konjunktur des Zählens – oder wie man Quantifizierung quantifiziert. Eine empirische Analyse der Anwendung quantitativer Methoden in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft (/isis/citation/CBB984634291/)

Article William H. Brock; (2022)
The Long and Short of It: The Future Writing of History of Chemistry (/isis/citation/CBB683831416/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}