Innovation in a crisis: rethinking conferences and scholarship in a pandemic and climate emergency

It is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. The rationale and actions of the BSHS in creating its Global Digital History of Science Festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 meant that the society's usual annual conference – like everyone else's – had to be cancelled. Once the society decided to go digital, we had a hundred days to organize and deliver our first online festival. In the hope that this will help, inspire and warn colleagues around the world who are also trying to move online, we here detail the considerations, conversations and thinking behind the organizing team's decisions

‘A Method for Safe Transmission’: the Microscope Slides of the American Postal Microscopical Club

In the 1870s, microscopy societies began to proliferate in the United States. Most of these societies attracted microscopists from surrounding cities, but the American Postal Microscopical Club, modelled on the British Postal Microscopical Society, used the postal system to connect microscopists scattered across the country. Club members exchanged microscope slides and notes following a chain-letter system. The main objective of the club was to teach its members how to make permanent slides. Preparation and mounting methods required technical skill, which was, as even club members had to admit, difficult to learn without personal instruction. Yet members developed ways to share craft knowledge through the post. Drawing on the private notes of a member and published reports on the slides circulated, this paper challenges the widespread assumption that the generation of craft knowledge depended on the co-location of artisans. It argues that microscopists' knowledge of preparation methods was intertwined with their skill in building and navigating information infrastructures, and that by tracing these infrastructures we gain a better understanding of how craft knowledge travelled in the late nineteenth century

“A Co-operation of Observers”: Crafting knowledge infrastructures for microscopy

In 1887, the President of the British Postal Microscopical Society, J. W. Measures, declared that "the beginner is unable to learn from the books on the microscope all the minutiae of so fine an art as mounting (microscope specimens). "1 The preparation of microscope slides, the observation of specimens, as well as the use (and production) of a compound microscope and its many accessories indeed required a high level of practical skill, or craft knowledge, which could only be gained through innumerable hours of training and was often difficult to translate into written instructions. Since skills require some manual dexterity and seem difficult , if not impossible, to codify in text, historians have so far tended to assume that learning skills from other scientific practitioners requires some form of on-site interaction. As the historian Myles Jackson explains in an article reviewing the scholarship on skill in the history of science, skills "are acquired through direct contact and personal observation of experimental technique. "2 Only more recently have historians, mostly early modernists, begun to question the assumption that acquired skills requires historical actors to be co-present, a discussion that this dissertation extends to the history of microscopy in the late nineteenth century