It's publication day for The Broken Machine (@mitpress.bsky.social)! The book explores the intertwined histories of breaking machines, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic, revealing how failing technologies have also shaped our world. mitpress.mit.edu/978026255334... #sts #histtech

Now out: How did earthquakes come to have a (quantitative) size? How can we quantify without experimental control? @cristianlarph.bsky.social and I answer both questions and show their implications for human science measurement. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #philsci #histsci #seismology

Just published: our introduction to the history of peer review in the humanities! (with Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Very happy to share that my monograph on the negotiation of global asymmetries of science has been recently published! bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/colonial-leg...

Four articles from our Special Issue "The Past and Present of Humanities Peer Review" in Minerva are available now. Two more articles, along with a general introduction, will follow shortly! link.springer.com/collections/...

In next week's Jour Fixe, @alexcsiszar.bsky.social (Harvard University) will present on "Exporting publication standards: Eugene Garfield's global travels" www.rmz.hu-berlin.de... 29.10.25, 11 CET, join us in person/ via zoom (link on website)! @ibi-hu.bsky.social

I at last got to sit down and read “Limits of the Numerical” ed. @annaalexandrova.bsky.social, Stephen John, and @cnewf.bsky.social. This is a great book. It pushes against some of our received STS wisdom about quantification in super productive ways. Essential! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Onilne workshop on quantification! The Society for the Study of Measurement is delighted to host an event on the philosophy, sociology, and history of quantification across the sciences on August 9. Free with registration. #philsci #philsky #histsci #histtech #sts #sociology 🧪 tinyurl.com/5rn7p7sk

I've long been fascinated by the fact that wood engravings for newspaper illustrations were often based on photographs (e.g. of the Crimean War front) in the 1860s, but I hadn't really considered that photography would be used to reproduce/pirate engravings this early! #needtoreadmorearthistory

The Democrats on the House Science Committee have set up a website to collect stories from fired federal employees, anonymously if desired democrats-science.house.gov/sciencefirings

At the beginning of the semester, if questions of AI in academia are stressing you out, could I suggest reading through our most recent set of essays? online.ucpress.edu/hsns/issue/5...

My first new initiative at @arlnews.bsky.social! Book-length studies of scholarly communities can signal changes in research practice, but library leaders are often too busy to read them. This series aims to distill actionable insights in the key of epistemic diversity. www.arl.org/blog/introdu...

Shared my doubts with a @nytimes.com journalist about how much I think the FDA’s new front-of-package labels are going to improve consumers’ health, quoted in his article here, “F.D.A. Proposes New Food Labels to Detail Sugar, Fat and Salt Levels”: www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/h.... #FromLabelToTable

Fellow #histSTM scholars! The "Essays and Reviews" section of Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (@hsnatsci.bsky.social) is looking for contributors to a February 2026 special section on "Historical Practices." More information in this Call for Proposals + in this thread. (1/?)

Surprise major archive find today - Paul Lazarsfeld apparently hired Theodor Adorno to write a 100pp qualitative analysis of quantitative participant interviews for something called the “Labor Project” in 1944, same year that “Dialectic of Enlightenment” was published. Yes, it’s interesting.

Thrilled to announce that the Call for Papers of "The Making of the Humanities XI" conference in Lund (9-11 October 2024) is open! Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2024 Organized by the Board of Events of the Society for the History of the Humanities. historyofhumanities.org/upcoming-mee...

CfP: How Sciences End Oxford, 11-13 July 2025 Deadline: 31 January 2025 Submit 250-word abstracts to [email protected] [I'm broadcasting this on behalf of Joe Martin, Michelle Aroney & Alex Aylward, none of whom AFAIK are on this site yet]

We know, summer is a long way away. But we can't think of anything other than our upcoming BSHS conference. So, we wanted to share our excitement and remind you to submit your abstract for the 2025 BSHS conference in Cambridge, July 8-10 until Jan 10! https://buff.ly/3YWqCp6

Into the Unknown: France faces an uncertain future. tocqueville21.com/art-goldhamm...

Out now! @thorstenpeetz.bsky.social Our Routledge International Handbook of Valuation and Society has arrived! A big thank you to our fantastic colleagues who have contributed to this comprehensive compendium of research on valuation and evaluation in various societal spheres! lmy.de/ASSuq

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH for sharing this terrific postdoc @jcblibrary.bsky.social! I'm testing your generosity here but would love to also share that we have TWO additional senior research fellowships for BROWN2026. Details at apply.interfolio.com/159128 and see number 2 below for terms... 1/

The French government has fallen. What does that mean, and why did it happen? Some background and a short explainer 🧵

CfP: Predicting Europe. Histories of the Future in Post-1945 Europe Deadline: 17 January

... your work, everyone who attended these talks, Oliver Lazarus for helping with logistics, and, as always, the Harvard University Asia Center for sponsoring the series! 🙏 See you in the spring! (lineup 👇) scholar.harvard.edu/seow/STinAsia 2/2 #histstm #histsci #histtech #histmed #envhist 🧪

When Matt shared this, I didn’t at first fully understand how great a resource it is. When Hathi has full text he *links*to it — so this is in effect the beginning of a legal, open 20c corpus. I didn’t know we had that.

A feast—like ordering dinner from a famous chef, knowing it’ll be good, not realizing how completely fabulous it will be

After Springer in 2022, now Elsevier forbids OpenAlex to store abstracts of Closed Access papers. github.com/ourresearch/... We think this is a worrying trend, hindering the discoverability of research. @relx.bsky.social Is this what you mean with 'Empowering Open Science' ?

I wrote a little introduction to the research project I am about to start working on soon ✨ If the title “Datafying Universities: The social construction of organizations as statistical units” sounds inviting or relevant to you—maybe you want to check it out! 👉 jelenabrankovic.net/datafying-un...

Here's a new set of short pieces on "AI and Scholarly Journals" put together by @mbaldwin.bsky.social and Brigid Vance: online.ucpress.edu/hsns/issue/5... My piece, "Blurry Authorship," situates LLMs within the long history of attempts at condensing scholarly knowledge. doi.org/10.1525/hsns...

This one is extra special to us because it is THE VERY LAST Isis issue we worked on. Perhaps it is special to you too because it celebrates the HSS Centennial? Or because it has such a handsome cover image? #HistSci #HistSTM www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/isis/cur...

Here is a short piece I wrote about what George Sarton thought he was up to back in 1912 when he was planning out his new journal Isis. History of science was a contribution to what he called "géniologie" (the study of genius), a branch of eugenics. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

届いた（解説者特権）

Excited to be speaking about DIGITIZING DIAGNOSIS (@hopkinspress) next week at Countway Medical Library! Register here: libcal.countway.harvard.edu/event/11443761

Here is the latest issue of BJHS Themes -- Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power -- which developed out of our Mellon Sawyer Seminar. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS – I'm teaming up with Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt to edit a special issue of Minerva on the history of peer review in the humanities (and its connection to the sciences). Submit your abstracts by March 15, 2024, and help us spread the word! link.springer.com/collections/...

The latest issue of the British Journal for the History of Science on 'The Art of Gathering: Histories of International Scientific Conferences' is out now! Check out the fantastic articles and reviews online - members get free access to all our issues! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The reading is my new Cambridge Element on Logical Empiricism. Freely available now online for a couple of weeks. #NeonPositivism