Science Museum Group Journal Issue 5
Science Museum Group Journal Issue 5
Science Museum Group Journal Issue 5
Issue 05 of the Journalcelebrates several important recent and upcoming events in the Science Museum Group. Preceding the inaugural research conference in April that marks the opening of the new Dana Research Centre and Library at the Science Museum, we feature several articles from key conference speakers discussing themes including co-production, museum visiting as a kind of research, and issues relating to the display of objects. Andrew McLean, for instance, commemorates the world famous Flying Scotsman’s flagship journey following an extensive conservation/renovation programme. His article explores the role the Flying Scotsman has played in the ‘preservation of authenticity’ in the context of Britain’s industrial heritage. Doug Millard, curator of the Cosmonauts exhibition gives his insight into the project as it moves out of the Science Museum. And Iris Veysey, one of the curators of the upcoming Mathematics gallery at the Museum offers a new type of ‘object focus’ article that explores early use of statistics by Florence Nightingale and Harriet Martineau, and the production of the ‘Rose Diagram’.
Collection Details
Creator (organisation)
Science Museum Group
Language
English
Related collection
Licence
CC BY 4.0
Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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Item type:Book review, Review: The Fate of Anatomical Collections, edited by Rina Knoeff and Robert Zwijnenberg(2016-03-16)Chaplin, Simon - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
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Item type:Journal article, Flying Scotsman: modernity, nostalgia and Britain’s ‘cult of the past’(2016-03-16)McLean, AndrewFlying Scotsman is arguably the world’s most famous steam locomotive. The engine, a standard bearer of British engineering excellence and modernity in the 1920s, became, in the 1960s, a symbol of the dying age of steam. As Britain’s post war austerity and increasingly lesser role in the world gave way to Harold Wilson’s modernising ‘white heat of technology’ Britain’s ‘cult of the past’ took greater hold. Wistful nostalgia for the past can be seen across the cultural landscape of the 1960s in books, poetry, music, television and film. With a marked increase in the rise and popularity of preservation groups across the country this was a decade when interest in Britain’s ‘national heritage’ enjoyed enormous growth. Viewed within this context the remarkable saving of a steam locomotive from the scrapyard as Britain’s railway abandoned nineteenth century technology illustrates how the past has increasingly shaped Britain’s cultural landscape. This raises wider questions about what it means to preserve cultural objects and how, if at all, their authenticity can be preserved.1 3 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Journal article, Functionless: science museums and the display of 'pure objects'(2016-03-16)Gauvin, Jean-FrancoisI argue in this article that the tangible proximity, the sensual evocative power of things is lost in a visit to the museum. Too often the aesthetic form of the exhibition utterly destroys the objects’ core material function. One of my contentions is that we cannot think with objects we are unfamiliar with, or cannot fully grasp and manipulate. In a museum we are compelled to admire the objects’ formal and abstract ‘beauty’. They have been robbed of their function: they are functionless. I address this long-standing dichotomy between form and function. I argue that Art has undesirably become one of the chief criteria of museum exhibition design. Though artistic attributes can at times acquire epistemic value, as I will illustrate with an example taken from the French Enlightenment, modern science exhibition design tends to utterly obscure the latter in favour of the former. Science museums, I propose, need to better adapt their discourse and presentation to the research programme developed over the last thirty years in the field of science studies: the history, philosophy, and sociology of experimentation, in which instrumentation and laboratory performance play a crucial analytical role in our understanding of scientific practices. - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
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Item type:Journal article, The ‘co’ in co-production: Museums, community participation and Science and Technology Studies(2016-03-16)Graham, Helen1 2 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Journal article, A statistical campaign: Florence Nightingale and Harriet Martineau’s England and her Soldiers(2016-03-16)Veysey, IrisThis essay is an account of the making of England and her Soldiers (1859) by Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale. The book is a literary account of the Crimean War, written by Martineau and based on Nightingale’s statistical studies of mortality during the conflict. Nightingale was passionate about statistics and healthcare. Whilst working as a nurse in the Crimea, she witnessed thousands of soldiers die of infectious diseases that might have been prevented with proper sanitation. After the war, she launched a campaign to convince the British government to make permanent reforms to military healthcare, compiling a dataset on mortality in the Crimea. She worked with the government’s Royal Commission investigating healthcare during the war, but also worked privately with Martineau to publicise her findings. Martineau and Nightingale grasped that the lay reader was more receptive to statistical information in a literary format than in dense statistical reports. As such, Nightingale’s data was interwoven with Martineau’s text. The pair illustrated their book with Nightingale’s ‘Rose Diagram’, a statistical graphic which simply illustrated the rate of mortality.1 2 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Journal article, Private portraits or suffering on stage: curating clinical photographic collections in the museum context(2016-03-16)Hennepe, Mieneke teMedical photography collections often remind us of the inescapable reality of human suffering and pain, and at the same time they oblige us to deal with questions of ownership and privacy. Medical photography collections are thus considered ‘sensitive’ collections within the museum context. This essay investigates privacy issues involved in the curating of historical photographic collections in museum spaces. When medical photography entered into non-medical domains privacy issues emerged. It is these privacy issues that cast a shadow of sensitivity on the medical material. But the relationship between clinical photograph collections and museums is not as straightforward as it may seem. Personal pictures involve power and privacy, and both aspects play a role in the public display of historical medical photographs, often in unexpected ways.1 3