Working Groups

First meeting of the Engineering Book and Journal Club.

We'll discuss the book, Vleuten, Erik van der, Ruth Oldenziel, and Mila Davids. Engineering the Future, Understanding the Past: A Social History of Technology. Amsterdam University Press, 2018.

Opening ceremony: roundtable on DHST activities and its comissions.

In this session, representatives of different DHST Commissions will speak about the role and activities DHST is carrying out.

READING CLUB - Articles from the Collection Ecologies Special Issue (Endeavour)

Fernando Amador II, "Street Showers: A Spatial & Environmental History of the American Fire Hydrant"

This month we are reading something slightly different - a chapter from Guangchen Chen's Collecting Antiquity in Modern China, published this year with University of Chicago Press. The book as a whole looks at how material culture has been used in 20th century China. An open-access version can be found here, where you can read the contents and introduction.

Geoff Belknap and Tacye Phillipson, National Museum of Scotland

"Playable Heritage: Developing a Collaborative Framework for Videogame Heritage in the UK"

ARCHIVING

In conversation with Laura Stark (Vanderbilt), Adrianna Link (APS), and Peter Sachs Collopy (Caltech).

Seminar with Sean Coughlin (Prague) on "Alchemies of Scent: Five Years of Text, Experiment, Replication"

Antara Chatterjee, "Embodied and Gendered Experiences of Illness: Some Fictional Representations of Tagore and Manik Bandyopadhyay"

Probing Gravity: Astronomy's Use in Testing Relativity 

Led by Connemara Doran. 

Behind the collections: a conversation with the Archivist.

In this session, speakers will share their experiences as archivists and reflect on the essential role they play in supporting historical research.

Elizabeth Kata (IAEA): Elizabeth Kata is the Unit Head of the Archives Unit at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria. She received her Master's in Historical Research, Historical Auxiliary Sciences and Archival Studies from the Austrian Institute of Historical Research at the University of Vienna.

Thomas Simpson, University of Warwick

"Knowing Earth through ice: frozen matter and planetary sciences before ESS"

Dead Cipher Walking: The Long Retirement of Triple Data Encryption Standard and its
Institutional Afterlife (1977-2025)

Pooja Shaymsundar presents their work-in-progress on the triple-DES cryptographic standard. Please read the attached draft in advance of the meeting.

Amelia Hutchinson (Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum)

Lightning sessions -- 3-10 minutes on your current research. End your remarks with a question you are wrestling with!

Henrique Antunes

Alan Sumler

Paul Gillis-Smith

Ramzi Fawaz

Raúl Aranovich (UC Davis)

Jan Potters, Sharpening Philosophical Concepts: Thomas Kuhn and the History of Quantum Physics (forthcoming HOPOS)

Meeting Topic:  How can we measure or identify colours, and why does terminology matter?

Nuance: Ashank Chandapillai on the problems of color in the history of astronomical photometry.

A series of short talks about the science and art of color description featuring:

Colour Reference Systems in Architectural Practice, using the NCS as an example, 
with Kine Angelo (Department of Architecture and Technology, NTNU, Norway)

David E. Dunning (Smithsonian), TBA.

Speaker
Alan Sokal
Professor of Mathematics, University College London (UCL)
Professor Emeritus of Physics, New York University (NYU)

Presentation
“When Science and Politics Collide: Lysenkoism and Communist Scientists in Britain, France and Italy”