Tools of Knowledge: Modelling the Creative Communities of the Scientific Instrument Trade, 1550-191
Scientific knowledge has helped shape the modern world. It has responded to and facilitated global exploration and commerce, the industrial revolution and medical understanding. While popular narratives celebrate famous discoveries and scientists, they usually overlook the makers of the technologies on which they relied. Scientific instruments embodied current knowledge and practice, both enabling and constraining our understanding of the world. It is the stories of these artefacts, and of the men and women involved in the trade that produced them, during three and a half centuries, that the “Tools of Knowledge” project will recover and share.
“Tools of Knowledge: Modelling the Creative Communities of the Scientific Instrument Trade, 1550-1914” is grounded in the ten thousand records on individual instrument makers and firms compiled by Dr Gloria Clifton and held by the National Maritime Museum (the Scientific Instrument Makers, Observations and Notes database). A range of approaches, including machine learning, will be used to enrich and model this dataset, developing an intricate knowledge graph that relates the biographies and activities of the makers to instruments held in multiple museum collections, and to the material, spatial and conceptual context of their production, trade and use. Operating at a range of temporal and spatial scales, a series of case studies will apply innovative methods of digital analysis to reveal new insights into these creative communities, in dialogue with the development of new tools for exploration and enquiry, including the use of 3D data visualisation.
Funded by the AHRC, the project is based in the Whipple Museum at the University of Cambridge. It is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge, the Sussex Humanities Lab at the University of Sussex and National Museums Scotland, with the Royal Museums Greenwich and the Science Museum, London. It is led by Prof Liba Taub (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge) as Principal Investigator, with Co-Investigators Dr Alexander Butterworth (Sussex Humanities Lab), Dr Rebekah Higgitt (National Museums Scotland) and Dr Boris Jardine and Dr Joshua Nall (Cambridge).