Built on 50-years of data in the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science.
The epidemic of COVID-19 appears to be reshaping the world, separating before and after, present and past. Its perceived novelty raises the question of what role the past might play in the present epidemic and in responses to it. Taking the view that the past has not passed, but is present in is material and immaterial remains, and continuously emerging from these, we argue that it should not be studied as closed narration but through the array of its traces, which constitute the texture of the present. To that end, and building on long-term ethnographic research on past and present epidemics in western Kenya, we assemble here some preliminary observations on the first weeks of COVID-19 in Kenya. We explore how the acute epidemic crisis currently unfolding is intertwined with layered fragments of earlier epidemic events, attending to material infrastructures, institutional practices, and ritual responses, to the presence of virally loaded bodies, pharmaceuticals, and their residues, and to the resurgence of often painful memories and emotions. People in this region have experienced a long century of epidemics and anti-epidemic measures of varying duration and intensity, from colonial and postcolonial sleeping sickness and smallpox to HIV/AIDS and more recently cancer, alongside actual or anticipated outbreaks of cholera and Ebola. This local perception of one long epidemic qualifies the notion of a radical temporal break that the COVID-19 pandemic is often associated with in European conversations.
More on teaching with the CB: If you teaching or supervising student projects on pandemics or epidemics, look at the IsisCB Pandemics Project. We have over 20 essays and bibliographies about all aspects of pandemics and epidemics: https://t.co/PbIKrc22yr #pandemics #hstm
IsisCB now uses subject tags and citation metadata to generate recommendations for other citations you might be interested in. You'll find these recommendations alongside any citation record.
Our new interface provides users with more information in a more intuitive format, putting the relationships between scholarship, scholars, and subjects front and center.
The new playground tools provide users with interactive data visualizations that allow you to see and make meaning from our database of citations, concepts, people, places, historians, time periods and the rich connections between them.
IsisCB Explore is an open access discovery service. Opened in 2015, it utilizes citation data in the Isis Bibliography dataset to power a robust search engine. Using Explore, you can discover publications, people, and concepts in all areas of history of science, technology, and medicine. The project is funded by the History of Science Society and the University of Oklahoma. It was also the recipient of a major grant through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2014.
IsisCB Explore enables users to search for citations, authors, editors, publisher, journals, and concepts using a dataset of over 220,000 citations to historical works across more than four decades of research in the field. The content is updated daily, so users always have the most up-to-date resources in the field.
The innovative design works through a relational network graph of the data based on two record types: citations (the bibliographic entries that have been classified and indexed) and authorities (the identity records for subjects, categories, authors, contributors, publishers, journals, places, people, and institutions).
All of our source code is at GitHub. Our data is open for use following the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.