history of science communication
I’m at the British Society for the History of Science annual conference this week (running a session on Horrible Science and Horrible Histories tomorrow).
As ever, it’s a great conference. Today was especially exciting for me as it was full of history of science communication. This morning we had a whole session on the history of the Science Museum (after all, it was their birthday last week).
We heard all about the motivations for building Children’s Gallery in the 1930s (largely to stop kids distracting grownups), the continual issues surrounding class politics between the museum and its visitors (e.g. suggesting they bring in a fee, so as to keep the ‘hooligan element’ of schoolboys from distracting serious children). I also learnt about a 1975 Science and Islam exhibition (one of the first to charge admission, though it’s not clear why), the role played by Science Museum’s library in 1940s war effort and why the Science Museum did so badly for post-war building works compared to other national museums. Not to mention the long and complex history of relationships with Energy Industry. It's not just about BP's sponsorship of the Energy Gallery. All fascinating stuff (though I do admit I’m a bit of a Science Museum history geek).
In the afternoon, I went to a session on film. This started off with a great paper from Tim Boon (author of this book), on Julian Huxley. He showed us a clip from Huxley’s (Oscar-winning) film ‘The Private Life of the Gannets’ and told us the fascinating story of Huxley’s 1929 trip to British East Africa. This was supposedly to show African schoolchildren his film, but Boon suggested Huxley took they whole project largely as a way of promoting the role of biology education in the UK.
We then had a couple of presentations based around the film achieves at the Media Archive for Central England (MACE), aiming to convince historians of science to make more of the non-fiction film archives scattered across the country. We saw some fascinating vox-pops (of people outside a cigarette factory just after the RCP report linking smoking to cancer), and a few interview with scientists. Watching these clips and Boon's paper I couldn't help but start playing fantasy PhD thesis: a history of cancer reporting; tensions of nationalism and local cultural identity in national/ local science reporting; the role of women in science filmmaking; the increasing television-literacy of scientists; a history of scientific visualisation on screen (fantastic shot of a 3d map starting the Huxley movie, and some lovely 30s microscopy films).
These are only a snippet of the possible stories bursting to be told from these rich archives. To keep everything on a kids and science focus, I also think there’s a fantastic PhD to be written on the history of children’s science television, and Boon pointed out what a peach of a PhD topic the early history of schools-films would be. More PhDs on the history of science communication, that’s what I say.