Forty Years of Scientific Instrument Studies : The Scientific Instrument Commission (Scientific Instruments and Collections)

Schechner, Sara J. (EDT)/ Kremer, Richard L. (EDT)

Brill（2025/08発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 328 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9789004737570

Full Description

Since 1981, the Scientific Instrument Commission has provided a forum for annual international discussion of topics close to the hearts of those caring for and researching historic scientific instruments. During these years, increasing professionalisation of curatorship and deepened engagement by historians have led to important changes in these roles.

This volume is a cornucopia illustrating how instrument studies have changed and flourished over the past forty years. Four chapters review the work of the Scientific Instrument Commission by decade. The remaining chapters consider the historiography of instrument studies, the cataloguing of collections, historic instruments in exhibitions and educational settings, national trends, and the impact of new media. This book includes twenty smaller, in-depth "Fingerposts", or colourfully illustrated vignettes, presenting significant artefacts selected to span the spread of historical instrumentation through time and geography. They demonstrate the variety of historical questions and thematic analyses that can be explored through close inspection of particular scientific instruments.

Contributors are R.G.W. Anderson, Sara J. Schechner, Richard L. Kremer, David Pantalony, Boris Jardine, A.D. Morrison-Low, Giorgio Strano, Jean-François Gauvin, Sofia Talas, Pedro Raposo, and Floor Koeleman.

Contents

Figures and Tables XI

Notes on Contributors XV

Introduction: Forty Years of Scientific Instrument Studies

 Sara J. Schechner and Richard L. Kremer

Chapters

1 The 1980s

 Robert G.W. Anderson

2 The Scientific Instrument Commission in the 1990s

 Sara J. Schechner

3 The Scientific Instrument Commission in Its Third Decade, 2000-2009

 Richard L. Kremer

4 One Object, Many Worlds: the Scientific Instrument Commission in the 2010s

 David Pantalony

5 Transactional Tales: Historiography and Scientific Instrument Studies

 Boris Jardine

6 Expansion, "Globalisation," and National Trends

 Sofia Talas

7 Forty Years of Cataloguing Historic Scientific Instruments

 A.D. Morrison-Low

8 Forty Years of Permanent and Temporary Exhibitions: a Curator's Meditation

 Giorgio Strano