CENTAURUS The journal of the European Society for the History of Science, VOLUME 61, ISSUE 3

The latest issue of Centaurus is now available online. CONTENTS: Special issue: Technology and Information Propagation in a Propaganda War GUEST EDITOR: István Rév We examine the conditions of knowledge production, information transmission and both the uses and constraints of technology during the Cold War. Drawing on archives of Radio Free Europe, the Polish Radio, and Romanian secret police, the articles provide comparative perspectives on propaganda across the Iron Curtain with a particular focus on notions implying objective knowledge. The authors reflect on interactions between technology and politics in a historical context of the proliferation of deeply biased information. 1. István Rév, 'Neither objective nor subjective <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1600-0498.12235>' 2. Georgi Georgiev, 'Cold War atmosphere: Distorted information and facts in the case of Free Europe balloons <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1600-0498.12225>' 3. Ruxandra Petrinca, 'Radio waves, memories, and the politics of everyday life in socialist Romania: The case of Radio Free Europe <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1600-0498.12232>' 4. Joanna Walewska-Choptiany, 'Listening through the Iron Curtain: RFE and Polish Radio in the “fog of war” <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1600-0498.12227>' Articles 5. Jan Surman, 'Terminology between chemistry and philology: A Polish interdisciplinary debate in 1900? <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1600-0498.12237>' ESHS Contributions 6. Ana Simões, 'Looking back, stepping forward: Reflections on the sciences in Europe <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1600-0498.12215>' 7. Antonio Sánchez, 'Practical knowledge and empire in the early modern Iberian world. Towards an artisanal turn <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1600-0498.12217>' Book reviews 8. /Las “mentiras” científicas sobre las mujeres [Scientific “lies” about women]/, by S. García Dauder and Eulalia Pérez Sedeño (Editorial Catarata <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1600-0498.12218>) <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1600-0498>, review by Mònica Balltondre Pla 9. /Urban Histories of Science. Making Knowledge in the City, 1820–1940/, eds Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan (Routledge) <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1600-0498.12219>, review by Montserrat Cañedo‐Rodríguez

Call for Papers: Rethinking Relations - Michel Serres and the Environmental Humanities. Konstanz, 11.11.2021.13.11.2021, deadline 30.06.2021

So forget the word environment, commonly used in this context. --Serres, The Natural Contract--

Few contemporary thinkers have explored the passages between the sciences and the humanities as poetically and vigorously as Michel Serres. Spanning from 1968 to 2019, his work presents an evocative cartography of the interstitial spaces that connect mathematics, philosophy, physics, myth, history, religion, literature, technology, media, ecology, and art. The baseline of his thinking is an appreciation of complexity, of the ways in which contingency generates newness and form emerges as a function of unforeseen translations, ruptures, and linkages. With a penchant for the poietic processes of the natural world, he derives epistemological insight from the dynamics of oceans, mountains, clouds, storms, whirlpools, and tectonic plates—objects that are “multiple in space and mobile in time, unstable and fluctuating” (Genesis). Bridging the two cultures for him entails a ceaseless journey from “us to the world” (Hermes V), from the human to an environment that is never reified as an ontological outside. He recognizes that the production of knowledge is “always linked to an observer submerged in a system or in its proximity,” an observer who “is structured exactly like what he observes” (Hermes). Perceiving the communication flows among human and nonhumans as reciprocal and turbulent, his work describes how “[l]iving things and inert things bounce off each other unceasingly; [how] there would be no world without this interlinking web of relations, a billion times interwoven” (Angels). Thus understanding the world as “a confluence not a system, a mobile confluence of fluxes” (Conversations), Michel Serres leaves a legacy that marks him as trailblazer of the environmental humanities.

Serres speaks of his own work as the composition of an “assembly of relations” (Conversations). The modalities of connection in his work are rarely unilateral or linear; rather, they subscribe to the logic of spatial as much as temporal bifurcations, percolations, and morphisms. Recognizing relationality as a key concept of the environmental humanities, how may his writings be put in dialogue with contemporary ecological theory and science studies? What types of exchanges could be envisioned with relational onto-epistemologies and frameworks of more-than-human entanglements? How does his work lend itself to a consideration of art as a source of ecological insight? What are the rapports between his ecopoetics and the role of environments in the literary tradition from naturalism to climate fiction?

With the aim of facilitating interdisciplinary exchanges, this conference invites scholars to “think with Serres” and mobilize his work in relation to contemporary formations in the environmental humanities. We envision contributions that explicitly attend to the ecological paradigms that inform both his polyphonic prose and hybrid subject matter, tracing his “philosophy of prepositions” (Conversations) in the prominence of material communication channels and the multiplication of relational operators like Hermes, parasite, or the instructed third. Whether with respect to his promotion of a “global model of fluid mechanics [that] makes us recognise how nature functions, and how we ourselves function as nature in nature” (Birth of Physics) or his proposal of a natural contract that dislocates anthropocentric distributions of agency and envisions Earth as a political actor, we encourage engagements that follow his circuitous pathways between the local and the global, “nature” and “culture,” archipelagos of order and oceanic noise.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: William Paulson (University of Michigan) Jeffrey J. Cohen (Arizona State University) Julian Yates (Monash University) Laura Dassow Walls (University of Notre Dame) Stephanie Posthumus (McGill University) Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton) Paul Carter (RMIT, Melbourne) Petra Gehring (TU Darmstadt)

We invite proposals for presentations that examine the productivity of Michel Serres’s work for the environmental humanities, drawing on fields and topics that may include but are not limited to:

- environmental literature and art as epistemological media - environmental media and media ecology - infrastructural media and environments - materialist ecocriticism and ecopoetics - elemental thinking and ecocriticism - relationality and media technologies of relations in ecological theory - revisions of time and space in the Anthropocene - environmental dynamics in literature, art, and music - metaphors and articulations of meteorology and fluidity - politics and ethics of relationality and the nonhuman - ecologies of knowledge - histories of science, “nature,” and ecology - quasi-objects and quasi-subjects - deconstructions of “nature,” “environment,” “culture,” “science,” “the human”

Please direct proposal of 300 words and a brief biographical note (100 words) to moritz.ingwersen@uni-konstanz.de. Submission deadline: June 30, 2020.

Please note that the conference is contingent on a successful funding application, which will be submitted together with the final list of speakers in July 2020.

Organizers: Moritz Ingwersen, American Studies (moritz.ingwersen@uni-konstanz.de) Beate Ochsner, Media Studies (beate.ochsner@uni-konstanz.de)

Call for Papers: Heidegger in the East-Central Europe, Warsaw, 18-20 September 2020, Deadline June 30, 2020.

Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences) would like to invite to a conference “Heidegger in the East- Central Europe”. The subject matter of the conference is the presence of Martin Heidegger’s thought in the culture of the countries of East-Central Europe. Restricting the philosophical problematic to geopolitical boundaries results from the common – in contradistinction to other European countries – experience which befell particular nations and societies inhabiting the area lying in the East of Europe.

The purpose of the conference is to summarize and describe the legacy of Eastern European contacts with Heidegger’s thought. The conference is supposed to answer the following questions: what are the main directions of the reception of his philosophy in East- Central Europe? Is there any characteristic hint of this reception which would allow us to speak of the emergence of a particular intellectual formation?

In the cultures of the countries of East-Central Europe the personage and works of Martin Heidegger are treated particularly ambivalently. On the one hand, his influence on the entirety of this culture is not to be overrated and it reaches far beyond professional philosophy; his works got oftentimes critically elaborated and translated and his ideas were developed by the most outstanding intellectuals the majority of whom comprised the democratic opposition under socialism, and who, after the political transformation, became a part of the new establishment. On the other hand, from the very beginning, the reception of his philosophy was in East-Central

European humanities rather delayed and superficial and also somehow situated on the fringes of Western debates on the subject. Due to his peculiar style and political involvement, Heidegger earned many declared enemies.

While taking a closer look at the history of Eastern-European reception of Heidegger’s philosophy, one can safely say that the period of socialism is the time of its forced absence, which was only to be followed by its tediously making way into philosophical culture, which was concluded – at a time of the political transformation – with the sheer explosion of its translations and monographic studies thereupon. The nineties of XX century as well as the first decade of XXI century witnessed an increased interest in Heidegger, whose thought was associated both with the foundations as well as with the most recent trends of the entire contemporary humanities.

It seems that what belongs to a class of the most important threads related to the reception of Heidegger in the countries of the Eastern bloc are what follows: the issue of language and translation, the general diagnosis of culture and the understanding of history, the way of comprehending human existence, theological references of thinking about Being as well as political significance of the philosophy from the realm of (post)metaphysics.

If one is warranted in speaking of its peculiarities, what does it involve when compared against the background of the reception of Heidegger’s philosophy in Western countries (France, Germany, Great Britain and USA)? How do the circles of Heideggerians look like in particular countries? Are they homogeneous; or rather, quite the contrary – highly diversified? Can we speak of the existence of the Heideggerian left or right wings? By the same token, are there Heideggerian reformers and orthodox adherents? What does the problem of translating Heidegger’s works into Slavic languages, or into Hungarian and Romanian consist in etc.? What sort of relation holds between Heidegger’s philosophy and the most burgeoning philosophies in the Eastern bloc? And what about the issue of philosophico-political assessment of Heidegger’s political involvement, which can be witnessed in – among others – “Black Notebooks”? Does it have a bearing on current politics, and if so – then of what kind?

Furthermore, what is it in the way of thinking practiced by Heidegger that makes him so interesting to our own philosophizing, geographically and culturally distant from his? Why our local traditions do not suffice and need to be complemented by the remote thinker from Schwarzwald? Is it possible to find in our countries a similar philosophical attempt to the Heideggerian one, an attempt to ground the philosophical discourse in the native speech that would allow us to refurbish our thinking and allow us to speak primordially from the essence of our own language? Why is it that in order to access our own essence we have to mediate this endeavor through a foreign German thinker? Is it possible to repeat Heidegger’s project to re-anchor the thinking in the native tongue, and if it is, can we speak of a common group of Eastern-European nations that are historically connected, e.g. as the Slavic family of languages and nations? Aren’t we, therefore, obliged to retrace the common origins of our family of languages in order to repeat the Heideggerian gesture rather than translating his oeuvre literally by means of currently valid philosophical discourse, and perform this by means of an archeology of Slavic and other Eastern-Central European languages, engaging the philological tools of lexicography, etymology, perhaps reaching even the Paleo-Slavic? Would a comparative analysis of the Eastern-Central European translations of Heidegger provide us with means helpful in achieving the goal of a Heideggerian ontology of the Eastern-Central European Dasein? Or is the ontology of Dasein, perhaps, independent of any regional particularities, whether national or linguistic. In that case, all the local particularities would point to a common, prelinguistic denominator, i.e. that which is unspoken in that which is said, to quote a Heideggerian dictum. What would, then, be the point of articulating the ontology of Dasein in various different languages? In other words, if τὸ ὂν λέγεται πολλαχῶς, what can be said of this being which Dasein is from the perspective of its multivocity especially in its Eastern-European variation? What can we infer from the fact that Dasein is bycie przytomne, tu-bycie, jestestwo, przebywanie, przy-bywanie, tu-bytie, prítomnosť, súcnosť, život, pobyt, вот–бытие, здесь–бытие, се–бытие, существование здесь, присутствие czy бытие присутствия? What is the hermeneutic advantage of such plurivocity? Does the same hold for the entire development of Heidegger’s philosophy? How does one express Seyn (with sous rature) in Eastern-Central Europe? Finally, what is the consequence of Heidegger’s focus on the German language for us, non-Germans?

Organizer: Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Organizing Committee:

• Seweryn Blandzi (IFiS PAN Warsaw)
• Wawrzyniec Rymkiewicz (IFiS UW Warsaw)
• Daniel R. Sobota (IFiS PAN Warsaw)
• Andrzej Serafin (IFiS UP Krakow)
• Filip Borek (IF UW Warsaw) – secretary
• Robert Ignatowicz (IF UW Warsaw)

The deadline for submitting applications: 30 June 2020.

The applications coupled with abstracts are to be sent to the secretary of the Conference at the following e-mail address: conference@martin-heidegger.org.pl

Language: English, German.

The deadline for announcing the acceptance of applications: 10 July 2020.

Venue: Institute of Philosophy and Sociology Polish Academy of Sciences, ul. Nowy Świat 72, 00-330 Warsaw, Poland.

URL: http://www.ifispan.pl/heidegger-in-the-east-central-europe/

Call for Papers: Everything but Reading ... Praxeologies of Book Use', Hannover 16.09.2020 - 18.09.2020, Deadline 30.05.2020.

Schloss Herrenhausen, Hanover, 16-18 September 2020, sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation; Concept and organisation: Prof. Dr. Ursula Rautenberg (Buchwissenschaft, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) und Prof. Dr. Ute Schneider (Buchwissenschaft, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)

Six young researchers (PhD students and postdocs, up to 5 years after the doctorate) are being sought whose research is located in the above-mentioned contexts. In order to promote networking between young and established researchers, they will have the opportunity to present their topics and to discuss them in depth in a subsequent detailed discussion. 16 renowned scientists from the USA, China, Great Britain, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany have already confirmed their participation in the interdisciplinary conference. Conference languages are German and English.

In case of an invitation, the Volkswagen Foundation will cover the travel and accommodation costs for participation and catering during the three days of the conference.

Conference concept

The primary functions of the book as a medium of communication include the storage and transmission of information that is ‘read’, linguistic and pictorial signs that are decoded. The conference ‘Everything but Reading,’ on the other hand, focuses on the secondary practices of ‘using books as something other than books.’ As long as there have been textual media, books as artifacts have been designed and produced, praised and purchased, given away, collected and displayed, burned and worshipped as representations of ideas and subject matter. They serve as objects of bibliophile desire, means of identity construction and for cultural distinction. The book-as-object is building material for diverse social practices and symbolic-communicative acts on the basis of a collective or individual ascription of meaning (that is, the book’s secondary functions).

The aim of the conference is to shed light, at least to some degree, on the extensive field of symbolic book-related actions based on particular socially accepted valuations and practices within the network of ascriptions of significance and symbolic capital, material qualities and purchase price, and intangible value. While the “materiality of communication” has been a catchphrase for decades in various research contexts, especially in literature and cultural studies, this conference will focus on approaches from communication studies and the study of book history and publication.

The topic will be discussed in three sections in historical perspective, but also with reference to the present day: The book’s symbolic capital, the individualization of the copy (collecting, displaying and dedicating), and the book and lifestyle. While the centuries-long tradition of book practices and value attributions did not fundamentally change during the technology-based transition from manuscript to print around 1450, digital textual media and “e-books” represent a stiff test for traditional value functionalities and book practices. The transition from the handwritten to printed book copy hardly affected the body of the book – the book in codex form. Disruptive innovations and complex technology, on the other hand, are producing new incorporeal forms of the medium and fundamentally changing the media specificity of the ‘old’ book. We particularly welcome contributions (in German or English) that consider the issues listed below in the focus of the digital transformations of the book's symbolic capital:

- What symbolic values are attributed to the book as a medium in specific ways of use and in what practices is this expressed? - Which social practices are established in dealing with the book and are changing in the age of digital 'book media'? - Which spaces, times and processes determine the use of books, even under the conditions of digital transformation? - How are traditional values and traditional book use transformed and visible in the digital space? - To what extent is the use of books an expression of the individual or a milieu-specific lifestyle? How do digital book media take up and implement these attributions? - What transformations are currently in flux and what might the symbolic capital of the digital book look like in the future?

Submission of applications

The organizers ask for a concise abstract of the current or completed research project and a short CV to Prof. Dr. Ursula Rautenberg (ursula.rautenberg@fau.de) and to Prof. Dr. Ute Schneider (uschneid@uni-mainz.de) by 30 May 2020. A decision on the acceptance of contributions will be taken by 30 June 2020 at the latest.

Call for Papers: Continuity and Change: New Perspectives on Book History in the Habsburg Monarchy during the long 18th Century. Vienna, 26th-27th November 2020. Deadline 15th May 2020

Organisers: PD Dr. Thomas Wallnig and Dr. Mona Garloff (Austrian Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (OGE18) / University of Vienna)

Venue: University of Vienna, Department of History

This workshop is dedicated to the history of the book trade in the Habsburg Monarchy in the late 17th and 18th centuries. In book history, the middle of the 18th century is regarded as a turning point: Here, the modern book trade is considered to have begun, setting it apart from the developments in previous centuries. It is worthwhile to place the establishment of the (modern) major publishing house, as it occurred since the 1680s, in the context of the history of the book trade in the later 18th century. Frequently, the changes in the second half of the 18th century are examined in their repercussions on the book trade with a focus on the Leipzig Fair, which places too much emphasis on the central German, Protestant, Enlightenment-oriented production of literature. We will try to understand, instead, the entelechy of the predominantly Catholic book production, which centers on the South and Southeast of the Holy Roman Empire. Long before Johann Thomas Trattner, Catholic publishers had already perfected the reprinting process of books, and this was taken on board by Protestant publishing houses, as well. For an appropriate evaluation of the book market, it is necessary to move away from the exclusive focus on the body of Enlightenment literature, and take the entire offer of publications into account, including the large print runs of prayer and devotional books, sermons, advice books, folkloristic works and calendars, as well. The importance of the reform policies of Maria Theresia for the book trade in the 18th century must be considered as a continuation of reform attempts in earlier decades, such as the economic policy for the direction of trade, or efforts to unify censorship. It also makes sense to take a broader, inter-generational perspective on the establishment of publishing dynasties, examining them not only after 1750, but from the point of their foundation around the beginning of the century. In this context, it is also worth exploring the long-term integration of foreign traders in the respective city markets.

This workshop intends to extend research into book history from the previous focus on nation-states to a cross-regional analysis of commercial structures, book markets, and their actors as well as the customers. We are also interested in connecting the history of the book trade in the various territories of the Habsburg Monarchy with each other, taking a closer look at connections (and differences) between distribution networks, the setting up of stores, sales practices and markets, as well as a comparison of the books on offer.

Our workshop will provide a framework for discussing the continuities and upheavals in book history since the late 17th century, emphasizing the connection to developments in the second half of the 18th century. Key topics include: actors in the book trade of the Habsburg Monarchy (inter-generational company history, historical gender perspectives, the changing roles of the book trader), distribution networks in the regional and long-distance trade, official markets and secondary distribution channels (book peddling, private auctions), perspectives from individual institutions and economic history (governmental directing of the book trade, censorship policy), customer acquisition and advertising, library history and book ownership, categories of the book market and reading habits.

We especially encourage papers relating to librarian and archivist work and current MA and PhD projects. Our workshop will enable an interdisciplinary exchange between History, Literary and Book Studies, bringing different methodical approaches together (research on material culture, spatial history, digital history, etc.). The idea behind our event is to provide an interdisciplinary, international networking platform for a long-term working group on the book trade in the 18th century.

Current program: Beginning on Thursday, 26th November noon, until Friday, 27th November afternoon. Following this, on the evening of 27th November, the “Day of the 18th Century” will take place, organized by the Austrian Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (OGE18).

We can offer partial compensation for travel and hotel expenses, if they cannot be covered by the presenter’s home institution. Please send your abstracts (English or German, 1.500 characters) to PD Dr. Thomas Wallnig (thomas.wallnig@univie.ac.at) by 15th May.

[Photo: Shopping at the Temple of the Muses in a print by Rudolph Ackermann from 1809. (BL Maps K.Top.27.21.b.), from http://www.templeofthemuses.org/?page_id=46]

Thomas Rid: Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. ISBN-13: 978-0374287269

This revelatory and dramatic history of disinformation traces the rise of secret organized deception operations from the interwar period to contemporary internet troll farms We live in the age of disinformation—of organized deception. Spy agencies pour vast resources into hacking, leaking, and forging data, often with the goal of weakening the very foundation of liberal democracy: trust in facts. Thomas Rid, a renowned expert on technology and national security, was one of the first to sound the alarm. More than four months before the 2016 election, he warned that Russian military intelligence was “carefully planning and timing a high-stakes political campaign" to disrupt the democratic process. But as crafty as such so-called active measures have become, they are not new. The story of modern disinformation begins with the post-Russian Revolution clash between communism and capitalism, which would come to define the Cold War. In Active Measures, Rid reveals startling intelligence and security secrets from materials written in more than ten languages across several nations, and from interviews with current and former operatives. He exposes the disturbing yet colorful history of professional, organized lying, revealing for the first time some of the century’s most significant operations—many of them nearly beyond belief. A White Russian ploy backfires and brings down a New York police commissioner; a KGB-engineered, anti-Semitic hate campaign creeps back across the Iron Curtain; the CIA backs a fake publishing empire, run by a former Wehrmacht U-boat commander, that produces Germany’s best jazz magazine. Rid tracks the rise of leaking, and shows how spies began to exploit emerging internet culture many years before WikiLeaks. Finally, he sheds new light on the 2016 election, especially the role of the infamous “troll farm” in St. Petersburg as well as a much more harmful attack that unfolded in the shadows. Active Measures takes the reader on a guided tour deep into a vast hall of mirrors old and new, pointing to a future of engineered polarization, more active and less measured—but also offering the tools to cut through the deception.

Thomas Rid is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. He testified on disinformation in front of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Excerpt: https://www.wired.com/story/uncovering-operation-neptun-the-cold-wars-most-daring-disinformation-campaign/

Call for Articles: MARTOR 26/2021 VISUAL ETHICS AFTER COMMUNISM

UPDATE: DEADLINE EXTENDED FOR 4th of May 2020

Publication date: November 2021.

The Museum of the Romanian Peasant is seeking contributions for its annual journal Martor 26/2021, on the topic of Visual Ethics after Communism. Martor is a peer-reviewed academic journal, established in 1996, indexed by EBSCO, Index Copernicus, CEEOL, AIO, and MLA International Bibliography, with a focus on cultural and visual anthropology, ethnology and museology.

This special issue to appear in 2021 will problematize the often-uncritical use of images in publications and displays about communism. This themed issue will pose a number of questions for anthropologists, historians, museologists and others. When does an image or a museum display present itself as problematic and for whom? Under what circumstances is it ethically justifiable to exhibit or publish such images or, conversely, to put images aside, leaving them undisplayed? When do arguments based on “the public good” outweigh the right to personal privacy, individual integrity and cultural patrimony of source communities? Inspired by recent debates on the ethics of the use of Holocaust and atrocity photography and colonial-era images of indigenous ‘others’, the contributions to this issue will address the use of images of unwilling participants taken through a hostile lens. The issue invites researchers and curators to find inspiration in various kinds of archives: both personal and institutional.

Requirements

We invite researchers working on Central and East European countries and other post-totalitarian societies to address questions of the contextualization and re-classification of images and displays, of dispossession and repatriation of confiscated community and family photographs, and the role that images and material displays play in the formation of personal, collective and national memory.

The volume will give priority to six individual articles (6 to 10,000 words). These will be supplemented by shorter texts (2.000 – 4.000 words) where more experimental writing, interviews or exhibition reviews are invited for publication. Please follow the guidelines for authors of the Martor journal: http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/for-authors/.

Martor is a journal where authors are encouraged to publish experimental ethnographic research and accompany their text with high standard visual material, thus, all contributors are encouraged to use ample images to accompany their texts.

We invite contributors to send an abstract (300 words) by Friday April 3rd, 2020. The selected articles will need to be submitted by Friday 11th of September 2020. Submissions will be in either in English or French.

Proposals, manuscripts, and other editorial correspondence should be sent to the following e-mail: revistamartor@gmail.com

Guest Editors:

James Kapaló (Principal Investigator Hidden Galleries ERC Project, University College Cork)
Gabriela Nicolescu (Curatorial Lead, Hidden Galleries Project, University College Cork)
David Crowley (National College of Art and Design, Dublin)

Contact Info: 

Tatiana Vagramenko, University College Cork, Ireland

Contact Email: 

tatiana.vagramenko@ucc.ie

URL: 

http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/call-for-papers/

Call for Articles: Edited Collection on "Digital Humanities Laboratories"

Digital Humanities Laboratories: Global Perspectives

Editors: Urszula Pawlicka-Deger (Aalto University) and Christopher Thomson (University of Canterbury)

CFA: A proposal for Routledge (Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities Series)

What is a digital humanities lab? How can we study labs in/for the digital humanities critically? How can a digital humanities lab become involved with industry? What is the culture of digital humanities labs? How does the existence of a lab change a discipline and the humanities at large? How are infrastructure and technologies intertwined within knowledge production? In what ways does access to digital resources and the standardization of methods affect the development of knowledge in labs? How do global infrastructural differences determine what investigations are carried out in a lab?

Questions about the role of laboratories in the Digital Humanities (DH) invoke the tradition of Laboratory Studies, defined by sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina as the study of science and technology through direct observation and discourse analysis at the root where knowledge is produced, in the scientific laboratory. The ethnographic investigations of laboratories in the 1970s/1980s done by a group of sociologists (Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, Karin Knorr Cetina, Michael Lynch, and Harry Collins) revealed the complexity of the production of scientific facts via a place, instruments, and community. Laboratory ethnography was a seminal movement which opened up new research questions addressed later by the historians of science and geographers of scientific knowledge. These extensive studies showed that a lab can become a gateway for understanding how knowledge is constructed and gains the power to transform nature and society.

In recent years, we have seen a significant increase in the number of DH labs established in the academy and beyond. Labs in humanities departments, libraries, and archives show that there is no single model for a DH lab and that they can have many different forms (e.g., physical, virtual, and distributed), functions (e.g., research, teaching, services, archiving, collection management), and practices (e.g., building digital resources, and text analysis). We have also seen the growing interest in the concept of a laboratory in the digital humanities, as exemplified by an increasing number of conference panels as well as seminars and workshops devoted entirely to this new infrastructure. The panel session “Building the Humanities Lab: Scholarly Practices in Virtual Research Environments” at the ADHO conference at King’s College London in 2010 gave rise to further discussions concerning transmigrating laboratories from science fields to the humanities.

Having made this point, it is still true that far too little attention has been paid to the epistemological understanding of this new infrastructure and its organizational implications for scholarly knowledge production. While scientific laboratories have been much discussed, humanists have just begun to explore their own infrastructures and spaces, which have their own specific requirements, management, processes, and types of use. Matthew Kirschenbaum has described digital humanities as “tactical”, both a means to obtain agency within a highly competitive and constrained academic sphere, yet at the same time genuine in its efforts to expand the theories and methodologies of digital research. Given that laboratories are highly charged in all these ways--epistemologically, culturally and tactically--it becomes imperative to reflect critically on the institutional, material, and socio-cultural organization of digital humanities spaces. Therefore, we propose to use a laboratory as a lens for investigating the development and legitimization of digital humanities around the world.

The goal of this collection is thus to explore laboratories in digital humanities in the global context: to reflect on their epistemological and organizational implications for scholarly knowledge production, to reveal the ways labs contribute to digital research and pedagogy as they emerge globally amid varied cultural and scientific traditions, to consider how they lead to the specification of digital humanities, a process that is still on-going, and to discuss how a locally situated knowledge creation is embedded in the global infrastructure system. Through this collection, we aim to consolidate the discussion on a laboratory in the DH, encourage scholars to engage in the development of their own infrastructure, and bring digital humanists into the interdisciplinary debate concerning the notion of a laboratory as a critical site in the generation of experimental knowledge.

Following the rich tradition of Laboratory Studies, we propose to discuss the concept of a laboratory in DH from a broad range of perspectives: epistemological, methodological, sociological, cultural, critical, historical, infrastructural, technological, and industrial. The purpose is not to reproduce the discourse of the 1970s/1980s but to make this discourse a starting point for reflections on how to interrogate the organisational structures of DH, and what can be offered to Science and Technology Studies (STS) in terms of analyzing a lab from a new, critical perspective. We also position this discussion in relation to the ongoing debates in DH, including such directions as an “infrastructure turn,” a “maker turn,” and a “cultural turn.” We argue that “laboratory studies” are in an excellent position to capitalize on both the theories and knowledge developed in the DH field and open up new research inquiries.

We invite contributions to reflect on DH laboratories. Possible topics and questions fall into the following areas of approach: 1. Epistemological approach - The exploration of different models for DH labs (e.g., physical, virtual, and distributed). How does the model entail research practices and condition knowledge creation? - An inclusive approach to contemporary laboratories: How are DH labs situated with regards to labs in other disciplines (e.g., physics labs, natural science labs, media labs) and social spaces (e.g. social labs, community labs, citizen labs)? What can DH labs borrow from other kinds of creative spaces and conversely, what can they offer them? - A DH lab in the GLAM sector. How are labs situated in public libraries, museums, and archives? What is the role of GLAM labs in the realization of digital (and non-digital) scholarship? - A lab and industry. How are DH labs involved in research and the development of IT for industry? How does a DH lab become a business? - A DH lab and indigenous knowledge. How do indigenous knowledges shape a lab’s practices and culture? What are the unique origins of labs beyond (Western) scientific traditions? - DH and allied fields. How can the DH enter into dialogue with STS, media studies, and infrastructure studies in terms of a laboratory and knowledge production? 2. Infrastructural approach - A DH lab and the global dynamic of knowledge (distribution, access to resources, a network of collaboration). What are the global infrastructural implications for locally produced knowledge? - A laboratory as a socio-material system. How are social and material assemblages entangled in scholarly work? How do a place’s infrastructure and operational capabilities determine the affordances of research? - Technology and knowledge production. How do technologies determine DH practices and methods? How does knowledge come to be embedded in material and digital tools? How do technologies carry social implications influencing organizational processes? - Sustainability of laboratories. How are a place, technology, and digital projects maintained and funded? What funding models work or do not work? What new roles (such as Research Software Engineers) are enabling laboratories to sustain their capacities over longer periods? - The complex network of laboratory work. How does a DH lab become a nexus of collaboration between the university, government and nongovernment agencies, commercial industries, and citizens? - A laboratory and situatedness. How do the surrounding institutional, geographical, and socio-cultural environments influence DH work?

3. Critical approach - A lab’s ethos. What kind of values are embedded in a laboratory’s organization, structure, funding, policy, research, and products? - A lab culture. What kind of culture (given social structure, roles, and cultural and gender diversity) is emerging from DH labs? - A lab and labor. Who does DH work? What is the division of labor in a DH lab? How can intersectional feminist approaches deconstruct social structure in a laboratory organization? - A laboratory’s boundaries. What are the socio-cultural boundaries of/in a lab? How are they set and represented? Who is allowed access to the lab? - A lab and its products. What are the ideological implications of using business approaches to software development and financial management? How does the tactical element of DH affect its other commitments? - A laboratory and public engagement. How does a lab take part in civic engagement? How does it co-construct knowledge with citizens?

Form and length of essays. Scholars and practitioners from across the disciplines (regardless of rank, position, or institutional affiliation) will be invited to submit their contributions. We welcome contributors from around the world to build the discussion beyond DH labs in the US and Europe. Submissions should take an argumentative stance, advocating clearly and explicitly from a particular point of view. Case studies are welcome as long as they are used as starting points for reflections on some particular issue and present an argument about that subject. Collaboratively authored submissions will be welcome as well. Contributions will range in length from 6000 to 8000 words including references.

Please send a 500-word abstract and a short bio to both editors ( pawlickadeger@gmail.com; christopher.thomson@canterbury.ac.nz ) by 15 June 2020.

If you have questions, please contact us at the email addresses above!

Contact Info:

Urszula Pawlicka-Deger

Contact Email:

pawlickadeger@gmail.com

Nauki społeczne na Uniwersytecie Warszawskim [Social sciences at the University of Warsaw], ed. by Marek Wąsowicz, Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2020, ISBN/ISSN: 978-83-235-4296-4

[Polski ponizej]

Social sciences at the University of Warsaw History of the social sciences at the University of Warsaw presented in the volume includes five main fields: economics, political sciences, psychology, sociology and law. The authors of the texts - specializing in the history of their disciplines - write about the process of their development on the academic level and about the changes they have been subjected within the University. The most important research currents, as well as the most distinguished representatives of the disciplines and their achievements are also reported. Keywords: social sciences, University of Warsaw, economics, political sciences, psychology, sociology, law

Table of Contents (PL)//Spis treści : https://www.wuw.pl/data/links/26f5618f818aadd491491a918209ec22/12389_6396.pdf

Introduction (PL)//Wstęp: https://www.wuw.pl/data/links/0eda2a016f2b06b5697f9b46700cf75a/12389_6397.pdf

Fragment: https://www.wuw.pl/data/links/3a0fd9a77e6abf1e2a256fa8db3eeca0/12389_6398.pdf

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Dzieje nauk społecznych w Uniwersytecie Warszawskim zaprezentowane w niniejszym tomie obejmują pięć głównych działów: ekonomię, nauki polityczne, psychologię, socjologię i prawo. Autorzy poszczególnych tekstów - znawcy historii swoich dziedzin - piszą o procesach ich kształtowania na poziomie akademickim i o przemianach, jakim podlegały w ramach Uniwersytetu. Odnoszą się również do najważniejszych nurtów badawczych oraz do wybitnych przedstawicieli tych dziedzin i ich osiągnięć.

Truth and Falsehood in Science and the Arts, ed. by Barbara Bokus, Ewa Kosowska. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2020, ISBN/ISSN: 978-83-235-4220-9; DOI: https://doi.org/10.31338/uw.9788323542209

OPEN ACCESS URL: https://wuw.pl/data/include/cms//Truth_and_Falsehood_Bokus_Barbara_Kosowska_Ewa_red_2020.pdf?v=1586512884220

The authors discuss truth and falsehood in science and the arts. They view truth as an irreducible point of reference, both in striving for elementary knowledge about the world and in seeking methods and artistic means of achieving this goal. The multilevel and multiple-aspect research presented here, conducted on material from different periods and different cultures, shows very clearly that truth and falsehood lie at the foundation of all human motivation, choices, decisions, and behaviors. At the same time, however, it reveals that every bid to extrapolate the results of detailed studies into generalizations aimed at universalization – by the very fact of their discursivation – either subjects the discussion to the rules of formal logic or situates it outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Keywords: truth, falsehood, science, art, subjectivity, forgery.

Contents

Ewa Kosowska, Barbara Bokus, Beyond Truth and Falsehood . . . 7

Jerzy Axer, Between Science, Art, and Forgery: Latin Textual Criticism as a Case Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Przemysław Piwowarczyk, Mechanism of Mystification and Demystification at the Point of Contact between the Humanities and Science: Case Study of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife . . . . . . . . . 36

Karol Wilczyński, Why Is Philosophy Bad for the Soul? Commentary on Al-Ġazālī’s Critique of the Philosophers . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Maria Łukaszewicz-Chantry, Only a Poet Never Lies… Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski’s Thoughts on the Privilege of Poets . . . . 62

Izabella Zatorska, Illusion and Truth in Theater from the Baroque to Romanticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

Wojciech Sajkowski, Honesty as a Trait of Non-Civilized Man in the French Image of Southern Slavs at the Turn of the 18th and 19th Centuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

Adam Grzeliński, The Validity of Aesthetic Judgments: George Santayana’s Polemics with Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Anna Żymełka-Pietrzak, Not Naked but Wearing “Dress upon Dress”: Johann Georg Hamann on Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

Marta Baron-Milian, Worthless yet Priceless: The Truths and Economics of Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

Paweł Tomczok, Truth and Falsehood of the Mirror: Subjectivity – Reflection – Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

Michał Rogalski, The Disengaged Researcher as a Type: Truth and Probability in Studies on Religious Thought . . . . . . . . . . 161

Rafał Zawisza, Hannah Arendt’s Marranic Evasions and the Truth of Her Cryptotheology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

Piotr Kałowski, Narration True and False: Dialogical Self Theory in Psychotherapy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

Anna Milanowicz, Truth and Untruth in Irony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205

Adrianna Smurzyńska, When Does Simulation Enable Us Adequately to Attribute Mental States to Others? . . . . . . . . . . . . 212

Joanna Barska, Music vs. Truth: Illustration in the Context of the Aesthetics of Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

Karolina Kolinek-Siechowicz, Truth and Early Music: The Intersection of Arts and Humanities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

Anna Chęćka, Truth Embodied in Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

Piotr Słodkowski, Truth of a Painting, Truth of Matter: Robert Rauschenberg, Henryk Streng, and the History of Art . . . . . . 252

Maciej Junkiert, The Polish History of Literature as a Lieu de Mémoire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

Jan Kutnik, Truth of the Place and Truth of the Exhibition: “Case Study” of the State Museum at Majdanek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271