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Reading Instruments: Objects, Texts and Museums |
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| Authors: | Katharine Anderson Mélanie Frappier Elizabeth Neswald Henry Trim |
| Institution: | 1. Science and Technology Studies, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3, Canada 2. History of Science and Technology Programme, University of King’s College, 6350 Coburg Road, Halifax, NS, B3H 2A1, Canada 3. Department of History, Brock University, 500 Glenridge Ave, St. Catharines, ON, L2S 3A1, Canada 4. Department of History, University of British Columbia, 1873 East Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1, Canada |
| Abstract: | Science educators, historians of science and their students often share a curiosity about historical instruments as a tangible link between past and present practices in the sciences. We less often integrate instruments into our research and pedagogy, considering artefact study as the domain of museum specialists. We argue here that scholars and teachers new to material culture can readily use artefacts to reveal rich and complex networks of narratives. We illustrate this point by describing our own lay encounter with an artefact turned over for our analysis during a week-long workshop at the Canada Science and Technology Museum. The text explains how elements as disparate as the military appearance of the instrument, the crest stamped on its body, the manipulation of its telescopes, or a luggage tag revealed the object’s scientific and political significance in different national contexts. In this way, the presence of the instrument in the classroom vividly conveyed the nature of geophysics as a field practice and an international science, and illuminated relationships between pure and applied science for early twentieth century geologists. We conclude that artefact study can be an unexpectedly powerful and accessible tool in the study of science, making visible the connections between past and present, laboratory and field, texts and instruments. |
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