Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte最新文献

In 1961, Lee Chin Eng jumpstarted the reef hobby, a hobby dedicated to the modeling of coral reefs in captivity, with an article in Tropical Fish Hobbyist. He illustrated the article with eight photographs; these images were meaningful to the hobbyists viewing them and they conveyed both information about the tank system and also claims about Lee's expertise. This paper examines three genres of photographs—landscapes, active, and passive portraiture—that appeared in Lee's article and how and why they have proliferated in the reef hobbyist community over the last sixty years. By tracing the history of these genres, we can better understand natural knowledge producers rely on photographs to exchange knowledge and cement community identity.

This article will investigate the ways in which Polish illustrated press contributed to communicating and reporting the work of Polish émigré naturalists working in Latin America to the Polish general public living in the Prussian, Russian and Austrian partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1844–1885. It examines the ways in which illustrations were used to shape the public's opinion about the significance of these migrants’ scientific achievements. The Polish illustrated press, its authors and editors were instrumental in shaping the public's perceptions of the reach of Polish scientists, and exploring their impact on broader scientific debates, thereby situating Polish people and their work in a global context. The didactic and opinion-making role of the illustrated press was highly influential among Polish audiences during this period, at a time when the survival of Polish identity, culture, language, and education was uncertain. Illustrated weeklies were one of the vectors through which high science was made accessible to the Polish public. A study of pictures in Polish illustrated press will help to explain how they contributed towards shaping the images in the public eye of naturalists’ scientific work, and discourses about science and its actors more broadly.

After the United States Congress passed the Water Pollution Control Act of 1948, biologists played an increasingly significant role in scientific studies of water pollution. Biologists interacted with other experts, notably engineers, who managed the public agencies devoted to water pollution control. Although biologists were at first marginalized within these agencies, the situation began to change by the early 1960s. Biological data became an integral part of water pollution control. While changing societal values, stimulated by an emerging ecological awareness, may explain broader shifts in expert opinion during the 1960s, this article explores how graphs changed experts’ perceptions of water pollution. Experts communicated with each other via reports, journal articles, and conference speeches. Those sources reveal that biologists began experimenting with new graphical methods to simplify the complex ecological data they collected from the field. Biologists, I argue, followed the engineers’ lead by developing graphical methods that were concise and quantitative. Their need to collaborate with engineers forced them to communicate, negotiate, and overcome conflicts and misunderstandings. By meeting engineers’ expectations and promoting the value of their data through images as much as words, biologists asserted their authority within water pollution control by the early 1960s.

Asia, America, and Europe have been intellectually intertwined for centuries. Several studies have been published revealing European scholars’ interest in the “exotic” languages of Asia and America, as well as in ethnographic and anthropological aspects. Some scholars such as Polymath Leibniz (1646–1716), were interested in these languages in an attempt to construct a universal language, while others tried to establish language families, like the Jesuit Hervás y Panduro (1735–1809). However, all acknowledge the importance of language and the circulation of knowledge. This paper analyzes the dissemination of the compilation of eighteenth-century multilingual lexical compilations for comparative purposes as an early globalized project. These compilations were designed by European scholars and subsequently elaborated in different languages by missionaries, explorers, and scientists in the Philippines and America. Taking the correspondence and relations between botanist Mutis (1732–1808) and bureaucrats, European scientists such as polymath Humboldt (1769–1859) and Botanist Linnaeus (1707–1778) among others, and navy officers of the scientific exploration commanded by Malaspina (1754–1809) and Bustamante y Guerra (1759–1825) into consideration, I will analyze how simultaneous projects followed a unified aim, and illustrate their substantial contribution to the study of language in the late eighteenth century.

Sheldon Pollock's justly famous work on cosmopolitan orders and processes of vernacularization in the worlds of Latinity and Sanskrit invites questions of a comparative and global-historical character. I will raise such questions in the context of the Persianate cosmopolitan order, especially as exemplified by the early modern Ottoman Empire, focusing on the wave of vernacularizations this empire witnessed in the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries. In this process of vernacularization, new vernacular forms of philological learning appear to have played a crucial role. Building on Bourdieu's work, I will try to analyze the Ottoman cosmopolitan as a pre-modern form of linguistic domination, and vernacularization as a form of resistance. Moving beyond Bourdieu, I will be arguing for a genealogical approach that is alive to premodern non-European philological traditions, and to the historically variable relation between (philological) knowledge and power.

Language was never studied by linguists (or philologists) alone. The greater part of the languages of the world was first known in the West through the reports of missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators, and what they documented reflected their specific interests. Missionaries wrote catechisms, primers, dictionaries, and Bible translations (especially Lord's Prayers); for explorers and administrators, language was one aspect among many to cover in their accounts of faraway regions. Peoples were identified by their language; toponyms served for geographic description; names of plants and animals were gathered together with specimens and images of plants and animals. In this context, linguistic materials were equally described as “specimens.” This article investigates the various ways in which language material was used and conceived of as a specimen, and the global trajectories of these “specimens.” Especially the role of naturalist explorers deserves closer attention in this regard. What they did, throughout the late 18^th and 19^th century, was gathering language material as one kind of specimen among others, Forster in the Pacific, Humboldt, Martius, and d'Orbigny in South America, and Peters in Mozambique. Two large-scale expeditions from the mid-19^th century stand out as examples: the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838–1842), whose collections later filled the Smithsonian Institution, and the Austrian-Hungarian Novara expedition (1857–1859).

This article examines the English scholar James Cowles Prichard's attention to language and comparative philology within his wider project on the natural history of man. It reveals that linguistic evidence was among the most important elements for Prichard in his overarching scientific aim of investigating human physical diversity, and served as the evidential foundation for his ethnology. His work on Celtic comparative philology made him not only one of the earliest British adopters of German comparative grammar, but a comparative philologist of European stature in his own right. More generally, linguistic evidence helped Prichard to keep his magnum opus, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, as logically ordered as possible, and therefore to turn ethnology into a discipline with analytical aspirations on a global scale.