Standard Grant: The Role of Craft Skill in Scientific Practice

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides support for the Making and Knowing Project, a research initiative of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University. The research brings together students, practitioners, scholars of the humanities and social sciences, natural scientists, and specialists from computer science and the digital humanities in formal university courses and a series of "expert crowdsourcing" workshops and working groups. The award will support further development of the project's collaborative and pedagogy-driven research methodology. It will also facilitate the completion of an open access digital critical edition and English translation of an important French artisanal and technical manuscript. The manuscript was never published or extensively studied prior to this project. It contains a huge variety of recipes and instructions in areas as varied as medicine, metalworking, surveying, ballistics, pigment and varnish making, cannon casting, and detailed observations of animal behavior. It provides an important perspective into the earliest phases of the Scientific Revolution, when nature was investigated primarily by skilled artisans by means of continuous and methodical experimentation in the making of objects during a period when making was knowing. The open-access critical edition will make the manuscript accessible to diverse audiences, and allow them to experience the processual knowledge of historical techniques through texts, images, and videos. NSF support for this project will enable the research team to continue laboratory research to increase the accuracy and enhance analysis of research results, and to transform the extensive research data of the previous three years, which is now stored in a variety of formats, into the critical edition for digital publication in 2019. The project is researching the manuscript's assemblage of written and practiced activity by employing interdisciplinary methodologies, including hands-on reconstructions of the recipes (using historically relevant materials, tools, and processes) and new data visualization and analysis from the digital humanities. The Project is thus innovating models of cross-disciplinary collaboration and pedagogy-driven research that will be incorporated into a Research and Pedagogy Template for scholars who wish to implement the Project's methodologies in their own research and teaching. The Template will be freely available as a part of the critical edition and the Project's website. The critical edition will also be freely accessible to diverse audiences. It will add a rare and important text to an extremely limited corpus of technical treatises and thereby provide rich evidence for new scholarship in STS, the history of science and technology, and other disciplines.