Special Issue (Working Group Volume)

Sounds of Language — Languages of Sound

• Julia KursellViktoria TkaczykHansjakob Ziemer

The contributions featured in the theme issue “Sounds of Language—Languages of Sound” address the period between approximately 1890 and 1970—from the modern disciplinary formation of knowledge about sound and the rise of the social sciences and humanities to the beginnings of computerized sound research.

Special Issue (Working Group Volume)

Global Perspectives on Science Diplomacy

• Matthew AdamsonRoberto Lalli

Contemporary scholarship concerning science diplomacy is increasingly taking a historical approach. Through cases discussed in the articles of the special issue we see that historically, in the Global South as well as the Global North, science diplomacy has often functioned to mediate the circulation of technoscientific knowledge and materials, and its historical study helps to better illuminate the resulting knowledge‐power nexus.

Special Issue (Working Group Volume)

Sonic Things: Knowledge Formation in Flux

• Viktoria TkaczykLeendert van der Miesen

This Introduction presents the key concerns of “Sonic Things: knowledge formation in flux,” a Special Issue of Sound Studies.

Special Issue (Working Group Volume)

Opening the Doors of the Studio

• Goldmann, JonathanFanny GribenskiJoão Romão

Special Issue (Working Group Volume)

Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge

• Sebastian FeltenChristine von Oertzen

This special issue is the collective result of a working group of historians who focus on very different periods and regions, such as the medieval Latin West, Spanish America, Qing China, and the Ottoman Empire.

Special Issue (Working Group Volume)

Verticality in the History of Science

• Wilko Graf von HardenbergMartin Mahony

History of science's spatial turn has focused on the horizontal dimension, leaving the role of the vertical mostly unexplored as both a condition and object of scientific knowledge production. This special issue seeks to contribute to a burgeoning discussion on the role of verticality in modern sciences, building upon a wider interdisciplinary debate about the importance of the vertical and the volumetric in the making of modern lifeworlds.

Working Group Volume

Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality

• Viktoria TkaczykMara MillsAlexandra Hui

Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality argues that the modern cultural practices of hearing and testing have emerged from a long interrelationship.

Special Issue (Working Group Volume)

History of Technology in Latin America

• David PretelIan InksterHelge Wendt

Despite having undergone major advances in recent years, the history of technology in Latin America is still an understudied topic. This is the first English-language volume to bring together a variety of critical perspectives on the history of technology in Latin America from the early-19th century through to the present day.

Special Issue (Working Group Volume)

Listening to the Archive: Sound Data in the Humanities and Sciences

• Viktoria TkaczykCarolyn Birdsall

Our aim here is to take a first step in research on the epistemic challenges that sound archiving has posed within and between the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences since the late nineteenth century—and even more so since the availability of digital sound archives and tools for sound analysis.

Working Group Volume

Surprise: 107 Variations on the Unexpected

• Mechthild FendAnke te HeesenChristine von OertzenFernando Vidal

Science depends on the unexpected. Yet surprise and its role in the process of scientific knowledge-making has hitherto received little attention, let alone systematic investigation. This collection explores surprise as a historical category, as a staged performance or as a spontaneous reaction, or as part of a personal experience during scholarly endeavors.

Working Group Volume

Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge

• Carla BittelElaine LeongChristine von Oertzen

Working with Paper builds on a growing interest in the materials of science by exploring the gendered uses and meanings of paper tools and technologies, considering how notions of gender impacted paper practices and in turn how paper may have structured knowledge about gender.

Working Group Volume

Entangled Itineraries: Materials, Practices, and Knowledges across Eurasia

• Pamela H. Smith

Trade flowed across Eurasia, around the Indian Ocean, and over the Mediterranean for millennia, but in the early modern period, larger parts of the globe became connected through these established trade routes. Knowledge, embodied in various people, materials, texts, objects, and practices, also moved and came together along these routes in hubs of exchange where different social and cultural groups intersected and interacted.

Special Issue (Working Group Volume)

The Pugwash Conferences and the Global Cold War: Scientists, Transnational Networks, and the Complexity of Nuclear Histories

• Alison KraftHolger NehringCarola Sachse

This special issue uses the Pugwash Conferences for Science and World Affairs as a means to explore important themes in Cold War history.

Special Issue (Working Group Volume)

Technology and the sublime = Tecnologia e sublime

• Giulia RispoliChristoph Rosol

The "sublime" evokes beauty, excellence, grandiosity, and at the same time fear, awe and danger. It triggers emotions that transcend the ordinary, confronting us with events, phenomena and objects that uncannily exceed our understanding.

Special Issue (Working Group Volume)

Experiencing the Global Environment

• Lino CamprubiPhilipp Nicolas Lehmann

The "Scales of Experience" introduces the special issue "Experiencing the Global Environment" by focusing on three dimensions of the theme that are reflected to various degrees in the constitutive essays.

Working Group Volume

Emergence and Expansion of Preclassical Mechanics

• Rivka FeldhayJürgen RennMatthias SchemmelMatteo Valleriani

This book aims to introduce a systematic framework for the historical representation and analysis of preclassical mechanics from a historical-epistemological perspective. Preclassical mechanics is understood here as a heterogeneous knowledge system emerging in the period roughly between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, before classical mechanics was formulated, in continuation of Newton’s work, as a coherent and comprehensive mechanical theory.

Special Issue (Working Group Volume)

Data Histories

• Elena AronovaChristine von OertzenDavid Sepkoski

The history of data brings together topics and themes from a variety of perspectives in history of science: histories of the material culture of information and of computing, the history of politics on individual and global scales, gender and women’s history, as well as the histories of many individual disciplines, to name just a few of the areas covered by essays in this volume.

Working Group Volume

One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences

• Bretislav FriedrichDieter HoffmannJürgen RennFlorian SchmaltzMartin Wolf

Taking the horrific events that took place at Ypres in 1915 as its point of departure, this volume traces the development of chemical weapons from their first use as weapons of mass destruction by German troops in Belgium to their deployment in Syria in the summer of 2013. The book has emerged from a conference commemorating the centenary of the events at Ypres, held at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin.

Special Issue (Working Group Volume)

Chinese Annals of History of Science and Technology

• Jürgen RennBaichun Zhang

In a bid to advance the history of science and technology as a discipline in China and to enhance the international influence of the Chinese academic community, the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences (IHNS), Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Science Press, in collaboration with and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), have inaugurated the English journal Chinese Annals of History of Science and Technology (CAHST), the first issue of which has been officially published by Science Press. The first issue focuses on ancient Chinese history and brings together archaeological studies with the study of ancient texts. For future issues, the thematic scope will be widened substantially and also include papers on subjects pertaining to later history.

Special Issue (Working Group Volume)

Testing Drugs and Trying Cures

• Elaine LeongAlisha Rankin

Practices of testing drugs and trying cures were clearly central to premodern medicine. As the present articles demonstrate, a wide range of actors conducted a variety of practices in order to assess drug efficacy; determine the virtues of plants, animals, and minerals; ascertain the composition of compound drugs; tweak production and application methods; and much more.