Collections and Collecting

Pedro Raposo (The Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University) and Tiago Saraiva (Department of History, Drexel University)
 
Teaching with Collections

In this session Pedro Raposo and Tiago Saraiva will discuss how they have been activating the collections at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University to teach undergraduate courses and topics in the fields of natural and environmental history. They will provide some examples that are intended to spark a broader conversation about the use of collections in HSTM teaching, addressing issues such as: the specific learning affordances provided by collections and materiality; how best to plan and implement a course or program entailing a significant use of collections; the role of digital collections and repositories; the limitations and challenges of teaching with collections. The audience will be invited to actively participate in the discussion and to share examples and views from their own experiences, whether as students, instructors, or collections specialists engaged in instructional support.    

Erin McLeary (Mütter Museum)

The Mütter Museum, founded in 1863 as a teaching museum for physicians and medical students, holds approximately 6000 human remains, collected by physicians to teach and illustrate pathology, the premier medical science of the late 1800s. For many years, it was assumed that these remains had been transformed through this act of collection into specimens that are forever severed from their human identity. In this talk, Mutter Museum staff will discuss how they are testing that assumption; how they are applying the extended specimen concept, first articulated within biodiversity collections, to collections of human remains; and how affiliating a specimen with its human identity can expand our understanding of the lived experience of those who came before us. This talk will also discuss how this project has raised questions of what counts as “data,” what counts as “research,” and what counts as “human.”

Andrea Weeks (George Mason University), "Lessons learned from SISRIS, a US-based initiative to support inclusive and sustainable collections-based biodiversity research infrastructure."
 
The SISRIS initiative is a workshop and symposium series that trains people how to use biodiversity informatics tools to discover, curate and analyze people data within natural history specimen databases. In the context of a natural history specimen record or label, people data refer to the individuals noted within the “collected by” and “identified by” fields. When used accurately, people data from natural history collection specimens can help uncover the history of science, accelerate research about biodiversity, and enhance the sustainability of the systematic research enterprise itself by allowing the collectors and identifiers to get credit for their work. Today, freely accessible natural history specimen databases, such as gbif.org, host nearly 3 billion specimen records, which offer an unparalleled opportunity for scientists and historians to leverage the power of people data, at scale. 
 
The name of the initiative, SISRIS, reflects our goal of effecting community-level change by sharing skills and practices that can support inclusive and sustainable collections-based research infrastructure for systematics. Central to the initiative is sharing with participants how and why the use of unique identifiers for collectors and identifiers can advance biodiversity research at a community level as well as improve one’s own professional recognition as a collector or identifier. During the presentation, we will discuss the learning objectives for SISRIS workshop participants, the longitudinal assessment of outcomes from 2023 and 2024 events that trained 80 plant biodiversity scientists and herbarium collections’ professionals, and our lessons learned from leading these events. We also reflect on why we believe SISRIS is an example of an effective strategy for building community capacity in biodiversity informatics that could be adapted successfully by other groups of collections-based researchers, including historians of science. To this end, we have developed a Git-hub repository of project materials for free reuse. SISRIS is supported by awards from the US National Science Foundation (2247631 and 2247632).
 
Suggested reading: 
Weeks A, Collins E, Majors TW, Murrell ZE, Paul DL, Sheik M, Shorthouse DP, Zeringue-Krosnick S (2024) Workshop Report: Supporting inclusive and sustainable collections-based research infrastructure for systematics (SISRIS). Research Ideas and Outcomes 10: e126532. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.10.e126532
 
Participants:
Andrea Weeks (Presenting) 
George Mason University, Department of Biology and the Ted R. Bradley Herbarium, Fairfax, Virginia, USA ORCID: 0000-0002-0000-4541; aweeks3@gmu.edu
 
Elizabeth Collins 
George Mason University, Department of Biology and the Ted R. Bradley Herbarium, Fairfax, Virginia, USA ORCID: 0000-0002-5352-0769
 
Twanelle W. Majors 
Tennessee Technological University, Department of Chemistry, Cookeville, Tennessee, USA ORCID: 0000-0002-6043-0737
 
Zack E. Murrell 
Appalachian State University, Department of Biology, Boone, North Carolina, USA ORCID: 0000-0002-6895-3161
 
Deborah Paul 
University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Prairie Research Institute, Illinois Natural History Survey, Species File Group, Champaign, Illinois, USA ORCID: 0000-0003-2639-7520
 
Matthew Sheik 
Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver, Colorado, USA ORCID: 0000-0002-9496-6898
 
David P. Shorthouse 
Independent, Gatineau, Québec, Canada ORCID: 0000-0001-7618-5230
 
Shawn Zeringue-Krosnick 
Tennessee Technological University, Department of Biology and the Hollister Herbarium, Cookeville, Tennessee, USA ORCID: 0000-0002-8027-5295
 
 

Anna Toledano (Los Altos History Museum), Nathan Smith (National Museum of Wales), Felipe Eguiarte Souza, (Pavek Museum of Electronic Communication), Olin Moctezuma-Burns (University of Cambridge), "Lost Objects: Histories and Futures of Collections": A Reprisal and Discussion of the 2024 CALM Caucus HSS Session
 
This session will feature a discussion of this year's CALM-sponsored session on "Lost Objects," which will take place at this year's HSS Meeting in Merida. The session abstract is as follows:
Considering the growing uncertainty of funding for historically-focused institutions around the globe along with the critical reviewing of the imperial colonial foundations of many of these institutions,we find ourselves at a critical moment for reflection. This roundtable will explore the ever-changing meaning of the objects in our collections, looking at how the smallest unit of an institution can tell us its actors’ values through what they collected and what they discarded or ignored and why. By highlighting specific objects in these collections, presenters will open the conversation about the future of our professions and institutions. By discussing their objects' imperfect pasts and uncertain futures in a post-truth society, the forces that have imbued them with value, and the reasons why they were collected. The place of the archive, library, and museum is being renegotiated and its future is uncertain.That is why we propose that only through an understanding of the communities originating of these objects is the only way to think about the future of our institutions, a future that must include the participation of these communities. Let us discuss what lies ahead and how we can make our collection work more inclusive and better for future generations.

Kristen Frederick-Frost (National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution), "It’s rad but radioactive: the dilemma of Robert Abbe’s medical radium"
 
The National Museum of American History has a collection of objects related to the work of Dr. Robert Abbe [1851-1928], a critical figure in early radiation therapy. Recent research has uncovered information about how these objects were used and led to an awareness of their uniqueness. But it also raised questions about how far museums should (and can) go to preserve such artifacts. Kristen is looking forward to discussing her work to better understand Abbe’s objects and hopes to engage the working group in a conversation about how we can deal with complex collections whose reach is significantly restricted due to their hazardous nature.

Jesse Smith (Science History Institute), "'Lunchtime' at Lunchtime"
 
Description: In this meeting, I'll give the group a tour of the Science History Institute's newest exhibition, "Lunchtime: The History of Science on the School Food Tray." The exhibition explores how knowledge generated about agriculture, food, and bodies has shaped efforts to feed children in U.S. schools since the late 1800s. "Lunchtime" begins with 19th-century food science, grounded in militaristic and capitalist interests, and proceeds through to 2024, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its updated nutritional standards for federally reimbursable school lunches. I'll discuss our exhibition development process and how we've attempted to use traditional history of science collections to do more socially-engaged public history.  And I hope to foster a collection conversation about the challenges and opportunities of such efforts, especially regarding concerns over the reproduction of conventional notions of what counts as "science." 

Hannah Swan, Lucas Richert (UW-Madison, School of Pharmacy), "Pharmacy History in the
Twenty-First Century: Modernizing the Edward Kremers Research Library and Archive”
 
This presentation will summarize the activities and findings of a 3-year National
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded project, “Accessing the History of Health,
Pharmacy, and Medicines,” which focuses on the archival collections of the Edward Kremers
Research Library and Archive, held jointly by the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy
(AIHP) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy. The collection was begun
in the 1890s by Edward Kremers, who served as the second director of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy and pioneered the four-year curriculum for pharmacy
schools, and continued to grow throughout the twentieth century under the auspices of the
AIHP. The archive documents pharmacy and pharmaceutical history through photographs,
advertisements, trade catalogs, correspondence, and more. The current grant project centers
on increasing the accessibility of the collections through the processing of five hundred file
drawers of print and archival materials, the digitization of historical pharmacy artifacts and
ephemera and accompanying implementation of a digital library, and the creation of online
exhibitions featuring materials from the collection. This talk will feature highlights from the
collections that are being processed, illustrated richly with images of pharmacy history from the
mid-nineteenth century forward, while also touching on the complexities of reclassifying and
digitizing an ephemera-based collection. We will conclude with a look ahead at the third and
final year of the grant work and what the future holds for these collections.

Judy Kaplan (Science History Institute), "The Berlin Turfan Collection, Disciplinarity, and Scholarly Biography"
 
Between 1879 and 1935 a series of foreign expeditions to the Turfan depression in Xinjiang extracted an extraordinary volume of antiquities. This ancient Silk Road oasis attracted Swedish, Russian, Finnish, German, Japanese, British, and French explorers. That said, the four German expeditions (1902-1914) were, by all accounts, the most comprehensive. Facilitated from the start by Russian scholarly encouragement and material support, these led to the collection of some 40,000 text fragments, representing more than 20 different languages and writing systems, several of which had previously been unknown to Europeans. These works provided a new empirical foundation for research in Indo-European philology and comparative-historical linguistics after 1904. Stored in German salt mines during WWII, divided among institutions East and West thereafter, these materials are now being reintegrated and reanalyzed through a number of collaborative digitization projects. My goal in this informal talk will be to explore how the Berlin Turfan Collection relates to questions of disciplinary history and individual biography.

Joshua Bell (National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian), "Big Histories through insistent things: Exhibiting the Global Stories of the Cellphone at the National Museum of Natural History"
What is the role of technology in our society? How has the cellphone transformed our world? What is the role of anthropology in a natural history museum in the 21st century? Thinking through the issues bundled up in these questions, within this talk I will discuss a new exhibit Cellphone: Unseen Connections that I curated at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). Cellphone examines cellular technology and its cultural, ecological and social intersections around the world, and is informed by a decade of interdisciplinary and collaborative research on cellular telephony in Washington D.C.. The exhibit seeks to demonstrate how technology is an essential aspect of our humanity, and that natural history is about, and for, everyone.

Bashira Chowdhury and Jim Giesen (Mississippi State University), "Sweating the Small Stuff: How Histories from Boll Weevil Logbooks and Collections Define Today’s Insects"

In 1969, the USDA launched a national campaign to eradicate the boll weevil, a major scourge of cotton farms across the Southeast US. The campaign started with a pilot experiment in Southern Mississippi to demonstrate that thetechnology to eradicate boll weevils already existed and required state and federal authorities to coordinate on when and where to spray insecticides. In 1973, Congress passed a Farm Bill mandating boll weevil eradication, ensuring cotton farms across the United States had to comply with federal efforts, and by 1978, the USDA started its multi-decade march to push boll weevils from Virginia and North Carolina to the US-Mexico border.  

      The USDA, and most cotton growers, consider the campaign a success. As of 2000, boll weevils were hard to find in the Cotton South. However, the program’s effect on the insect ecosystems of the region is unknown. As a part of its legacy, the campaign left behind volumes of archival material, scientific data, and insect specimens that may help us better understand how beneficial insects weathered these federally coordinated onslaughts of insecticides. We use these data and specimens to piece together histories about Geocoris and Nabis, omnivorous predators of a variety of crop pests. Experts today view both species as critical components of modern pest management. By documenting their histories, we shed light on two interwoven stories: how decisions by farmers, scientists, and policy makers shaped insectdiversity during the campaign, and how the legacy of these decisions shape ambitions to define and employ beneficial insects today. Together, this allows a new understanding of how efforts to advance a post-insecticide world may be delivered through beneficial services from insects.
 

Diana Marsh and Katrina Fenlon (University of Maryland), "Linking Analog Archival Data Across Scientific Disciplines: What’s Next?"
 
Currently, data embedded in primary archival sources are largely disconnected from networked systems of discovery and access that support research and reuse. This interactive session will invite a dialog between two strands of research focused on how we can most effectively make primary sources reusable as data, to support scientific research across disciplines. The first project, “Recovering and Reusing Archival Data for Science” (Funded in part by USDA, PI Katrina Fenlon) investigates data recovery and reuse efforts focused on historical data, including data drawn from archives, legacy research materials, and other primary sources. The goal of this project is to advance our understanding of retrospective data curation—both across disciplines, and across the boundaries of practice between professional data curators and scientific researchers. The second, “Building a sustainable future for anthropology's archives: Researching primary source data lifecycles, infrastructures, and reuse ” (NSF, PI Diana Marsh) builds on Fenlon’s work by taking a deeper dive into a single discipline. It asks how anthropology’s analog primary sources—including fieldnotes, photographs, analog audiovisual materials—can become findable, reusable data sources. The project aims to: identify current movements and future best practices for anthropology’s archival information infrastructure, evaluate test collections in emergent cross-disciplinary open access platforms, develop training modules for anthropologists and archivists/data curators.We will present two short presentations interspersed with discussion questions for the group, centered around: 1) how historical archives are being used by scientists, and 2) exciting advances in archival infrastructure or practice for data reuse.

John Sime (University of Pennsylvania), "The Illustration of Nature Recast: Jacob Green's Models of North American Trilobites"
 
A Monograph of the Trilobites of North America (1832) is a singular experiment in the history of scientific publishing. Each copy included a set of painted plaster-of-Paris casts of fossils to illustrate the descriptions of new trilobite species. Its author Jacob Green (1790—1841), a naturalist and professor of chemistry collaborated with Joseph Brano the artist who produced the casts. Trilobites of North America was one of the earliest classifications of trilobites, enigmatic fossils at the time that were hoped to be found extant. Today, trilobites are well-known icons of extinction. Many of Green’s trilobite genera and species remain in use and scaffolded future work. Trilobites of North America is also among the earliest examples of the use of plaster in paleontology. Green and Brano experimented with depictions of nature in three dimensions to escape the limitations of drawings on the page. Much scholarship has focused on Henry Augustus Ward’s catalogs of fossil replicas. But, unlike Ward’s, Green and Brano’s work was a reported new scientific discoveries. While the novelty of both the subject matter and method of illustration was recognized by American naturalists, today Trilobites of North America is known to few paleontologists or science historians. In this paper, I develop a historical account of how that came to be.

The first part of the paper is descriptive. I document the casts from Green and Brano’s collaboration that are now in collection at The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. I then reconstruct how Green and Brano assembled their monograph: selecting fossils in collections and making casts of them. I also report on the condition of the original fossils when they could be located, but most are now lost or destroyed. This section reveals that Trilobites of North America was the beginning of a nearly decade long collaboration with more expansive aspirations than first realized.

Next, I develop a picture of the epistemic and aesthetic values and practices that led Green and Brano to produce the Trilobites of North America. Green wrote about the epistemic reason for using casts instead of drawings: to produce more accurate illustrations. Aesthetic values also motivated the use of casts, as stated in Brano’s advertisements. I investigate how the casts reflect these values, comparing them to the fossils and paper illustrations. In addition, I examine what role the casts had in paleontological debates at the time, to see if they were used as intended.

Finally, I explore how the design of Trilobites of North America (text and plaster) gave it different affordances than other kinds of scientific publications (broadly construed) available to Philadelphia naturalists. I argue that this unique combination of affordances along with the increasing specialization of scientific practices led to the sorting of Trilobites of North America into its material components, where the connection between book and casts is often lost. Today, the text sits on the library shelf while the plaster trilobites sit in collection drawers.
 

Anna Majeski (American Philosophical Society), "American Natural History, 1750-1850: Depicting Nature in a Time of Change"
 
This talk presents the American Philosophical Society Library & Museum's upcoming spring 2024 exhibit on American natural history. Focusing on the work of William Bartram (d. 1823), Titian Ramsay Peale (d. 1885), and John James Audubon (d. 1851)--all strengths of the APS collections-- it traces how American naturalists engaged with the natural world in new ways, and in a time of enormous social and environmental change. Bartram, Peale, and Audubon are all key figures in introducing new ways of describing the natural world in both words and images, focusing on living nature in its environmental and ecological context, as opposed to the decontextualized approach of European taxonomists. At the same time, the natural world that they depicted was on the cusp of major environmental change, with contemporaries recording diminishing animal populations and dwindling forests. This show brings these two threads together, and asks how natural science is in dialogue with shifting ethical or social attitudes towards the nonhuman world. Moreover, it underlines both Indigenous and African Americans as both forerunners and major contributors in articulating the the new image of nature.

Pedro Raposo (Martha Hamilton and I. Wistar Morris III Executive Director, Library and Archives, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University) and Paul Callomon (Collections Manager, Malacology, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University), "People, Nature, and the Social Extension of Specimens"
 

Marta Lourenço (Museum of Science and Natural History of the University of Lisbon), "Engaging Storytelling: Reading Artefacts of Science"
 
The material culture of science – artefacts, collections, spaces, specimens – has been increasingly used as primary sources for the history of science, technology and medicine. However, due to tradition, past practices, object perceptions, and contingencies related to collecting, among others, scientific museums are often poorly prepared to document collections and respond to the demands of the "material turn" in history. In this workshop, I will explain why this is so important for contemporary museums – storytelling, diverse narratives about the past, "decolonization," etc. – and propose a simple and practical tool for documenting artefacts (the "Gessner Map"). Participants will be asked to engage with artefacts (despite the workshop being online).
 
Marta C. Lourenço is the present director of the Museum of Science and Natural History of the University of Lisbon (MUHNAC). She has background training in Physics (University of Lisbon), a MA in Museology (Nova, Lisbon) and a PhD in Museology and History of Technology (CNAM, Paris). She is the national coordinator of PRISC (Portuguese Research Infrastructure of Scientific Collections). She teaches Material Culture of Science in the Masters of History and Philosophy of Science (Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon) and is a research member of CIUHCT, the Interuniversity Research Centre for the History of Science and Technology (University of Lisbon).

Ally Fulton (University of California-Davis), “Stenographic Specimens in the Preservation of American Science”

Nuala Caomhanach (New York University), "From Unique to Ubiquitous: The Conflict of Endemism in Conservation Law"

Garrett Dash Nelson (Leventhal Map and Education Center, Boston Public Library) “More or Less in Common: Environmental Justice in the Urban Landscape”

Tad Brown (University of Cambridge), “Peanut Traces: Collecting Arachis from the Telegraph Line in Brazil”
 
"In this paper, I trace the enrolment a specific peanut, Arachis nambyquarae Hoehne, into scientific networks as a method for understanding how Brazil became known as the geographic origin of peanuts. The species was named after an Amerindian group in Matto Grosso as well as the scientist who published its first description. Botanists would later reclassify this peanut as a variety within domesticated Arachis. The taxonomic reversal offers support for the argument that the study of plant diversity includes ideas about human diversity."
 

Brooke Penaloza Patzak, FWF Schrödinger Fellow/ Visiting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania: “Geographic Provinces as a Doctrine and Framework for Scientific Collection and Display, 1860-1900"