Challenges on the Promising Road to Automatic Speech Recognition of Privacy-Sensitive Dutch Doctor-Patient Consultation Recordings

In this paper we present the currently running PDI-SSH project Homo Medicinalis (HoMed), in which we use machine learning to build an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) infrastructure for disclosing privacy-sensitive doctor-patient consultation recordings

Instructional Manuals of Boundary-Work: Psychology textbooks, student subjectivities, and disciplinary historiographies

This article aims to provide an overview of the historiography of psychology textbooks. In the overview, I identify and describe in detail two strands of writing histories of introductory textbooks of psychology and juxtapose them to provide an integrated historiography of textbooks in psychology. One strand is developed by teachers of psychology—first as a general approach for investigating textbooks in a pedagogical setting, and then later upgraded into a full history of psychology textbooks in America. The other strand follows a more familiar perspective of historians of science and historians of psychology who build on various post-Kuhnian and post-Foucauldian perspectives on textbooks. I make an argument for integrating these two views for a more comprehensive historiography of textbooks in psychology, recasting textbooks as objects of research and sources that are interesting sui generis for historians of psychology in their investigations

The Afterlife of the Leiden Anatomical Collections: Hands on, Hands off

The Afterlife of the Leiden Anatomical Collections starts where most stories end: after death. It tells the story of thousands of body parts kept in bottles and boxes in nineteenth-century Leiden – a story featuring a struggling medical student, more than one disappointed anatomist, a monstrous child, and a glorious past. Hieke Huistra blends historical analysis, morbid anecdotes, and humour to show how anatomical preparations moved into the hands of students and researchers, and out of the reach of lay audiences. In the process, she reveals what a centuries-old collection can teach us about the future fate of the biobanks we build today

Keep Focusing on the Air. COVID-19 and the Historical Value of an Atmospheric Sensibility

Future historians writing about the COVID-19 crisis will need to pay more attention to the atmosphere and its role in the current crisis, for the atmosphere is connected to the current pandemic in multiple ways: the atmosphere transports aerosols; it changes as a consequence of the social crisis; air pollution and COVID-19 deaths seem to be connected; there is a triple crisis of ‘oxygen-depriving politics’; and air travel has a large effect on the transmission of the disease. Increasingly, atmosphere scientists are contributing to the science of COVID-19. Dealing with the atmosphere is useful for another reason too: in the current age, atmosphere physicists and chemists have become key architects of the Anthropocene concept, and the meteorological sciences are increasingly claiming a stake in the environmental humanities. Environmental historians who attribute a larger role to the atmosphere would be wise to follow recent trends in the larger ‘geohumanities’, a new field that has exported the meteorologists’ atmosphere into the humanities. At the same time, environmental historians could also benefit from engaging with the history of knowledge about air, not just late modern meteorology, but also early modern physics and chemistry, and the pre-nineteenth century medical sciences that were less hesitant about dealing with the air. Historians should acquire what I call an ‘atmospheric sensibility’ by looking at the sensibility of atmosphere scientists of the past. Studying this sensibility means observing the way in which meteorological experts have used this knowledge to expand their discipline, in both the scientific and public realm. This knowledge can then be elevated to both create and strengthen specific themes in the environmental history of health. Areas of research could include, among many other possibilities, the difference between indoor and open-air work, or the importance of respiration, physiology and lung medicine in history. First acquiring and then deepening our atmospheric sensibility will provide a better understanding of the environmental history of health and pandemics in the current geological epoch

Onderzoeksmethoden in het Antropoceen: Uitdagingen voor een groene criminologie

This essay discusses green criminology in relation to the development of non-anthropocentric research perspectives in history and cultural anthropology. Green criminological concepts of ‘environmental harm’ and ‘ecocide’ turn doing harm to nature and ecosystems, even when legal, into object of criminological research. Historical research exploring a wider time frame deepens and enriches criminological understanding of, e.g., wildlife trafficking and climate change. According active agency to animals and other non-human actors and attempts to create a new language transcending human-nature dichotomies, as undertaken in transspecies or multispecies history, anthropology, and narratology, offer substantial contributions to green criminologies of everyday life