*STS Circle at Harvard* *[image: line.gif] * * * *Alex Csiszar* *History of Science, Harvard* * * on
*Managing Science by Numbers: the Emergence of the Modern Scientific Journal * Monday, September 20th 12:15-2:00 p.m. 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106 [image: line.gif] Lunch is provided. Please RSVP to [email protected] by Thursday, September 9th. *Abstract: For just over a century, the journal literature of science has been closely identified – by scientists and publics – with both the cumulative and the present state of knowledge possessed by the scientific community. A dominant historical narrative -- associated especially with Mertonian views of the institutional bases of good science -- posits that the modern scientific journal emerged essentially fully-formed in the late seventeenth century, and that its emergence was (and, as a corollary, remains) a central condition of possibility for maintaining trust, openness, and accountability in modern science. In this presentation I will argue, first, that the emergence of the modern scientific journal actually took place over the course of the nineteenth century, and second, that the shift whereby the social and intellectual authority of science came to be vested increasingly in serialized print did not come about through any deliberate choice taken by scientists based on the fitness of the periodical press to play this role. On the contrary, it occurred through a series of struggles in which the press was generally cast in the role of assailant, rather than savior, of scientific order. * *Biography: *Alex Csiszar recently completed his Ph.D. in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. His dissertation -- "Broken Pieces of Fact: The Scientific Periodical and the Politics of Search in Nineteenth-Century France and Britain" -- examines the circumstances in which the scientific journal emerged to become a competitor with, and eventually to take the place of, the scientific society and academy as the principal institutional site for the representation, certification, and registration of authoritative natural knowledge. A portion of this work was recently published as "Seriality and the Search for Order: Scientific Print and its Problems During the Late Nineteenth Century." This academic year he is an ACLS / Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, and he remains affiliated with Harvard. A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
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