petri dish

a big hello to this year's scipop students!

welcome to the spring 2009 edition of hsci 1133, "science and popular culture"! I'm glad you're enrolled, excited about getting started, and looking forward to exploring aspects of the class further here on the blog as we move along through the semester. Although the things I write about on the blog aren't confined to our class alone, the class is the heartbeat behind its existence, and during spring semester a great deal of what appears here will relate to course content.

Sometimes I'll post about a topic or issue that will be coming up soon on the schedule, and providing a sneak preview -- as you'll see below about dinosaurs as scientific icons. Other times I'll supplement our course materials by seeing what I can turn up on the web, just meandering down different avenues that allow you to do some extra exploration if you'd like -- as when we were looking at the history of conceptualizing the moon two years ago. Other times I may reflect on questions you all have raised in class or in your assignments -- this space gives me a place to work on my thinking about these questions at greater length outside of class (see, professors assign themselves homework, too!) Here's an example from a previous year, when we watched a 1950s television program that addressed evolution and religion. And there will be entries related to topics where there is so much interesting extra information to be found online, that I'll use this as a place to bring some of that together as a point of departure for those who might find particular areas interesting beyond what we've had time for in class or in the reading (for example, anyone up for pondering the relationship of medieval bestiaries and phenomena such as the Loch Ness Monster in the present day? Then you're in luck!). Or sometimes, stuff that is just fun (like history of science and Halloween.)

This week coming up we'll begin discussing the kinds of symbolic images that appear within popular culture relating to science -- as a kind of quick example, I passed out brochures last class that advertised the "Walking with Dinosaurs" extravaganza that rolled into OKC this weekend at the Ford Center downtown (here's a newspaper review and here's the official site where you can get a sense of the show and here's a review by a scientist, Brian Switek, at his blog Laelaps). Dinosaurs certainly loom large as scientific icons in the public sphere, and the idea of thousands of people gathering together in a darkened sports arena to watch million dollar mechanical/puppet/thingamajigs conjure dinosaurs back to the living world is certainly an interesting example of the intersection of science/education/entertainment/spectacle/commerce.

Trying to understand the ecology of dinosaur images as a social phenomenon even as it is a scientific one is part of our task in analyzing popular culture. For example, if the popular success of paleontology as seen by the arena rock status of "Walking with Dinosaurs" -- or the auction of the T. rex skeleton, Sue, in 1997 for 8.36 million dollars, and the busy schedule the copies of her bones have had in traveling around the US and the world -- are indicative of something powerfully significant, it would follow logically that paleontology would be a richly-endowed area of scientific research, with untold numbers of paleontologists-to-be clamoring to take part, right, with huge paleontological institutes part of the university landscape? Ummmm, not exactly. Discuss.

We'll also work on analyzing images themselves, and trying to discern the patterns of meaning that connect dinosaurian imagery -- as one example -- with other aspects of what's going on in particular cultures at particular historical times and comparing them with the present. We'll look at how it was that a prehistoric creature that seems relatively banal to us today -- the mastodon (how many kids run screaming through natural history museums demanding to see the mastodon fossils?) -- was the first fossil exemplar of the idea of extinction, and on whom we projected our images of a vicious, dangerous past. The newly-founded United States was especially pleased to claim this ferocious carnivore (!) as our own mascot: "huge as the frowning precipice, cruel as the bloody panther, swift as the descending eagle, and terrible as the Angel of Night." Such attention to big, cruel, meat-eating tyrants is still common two hundred years later. Exhibit one: Oklahoma's own state fossil, the Saurophaganax maximus [note the maximus!], ushered into state law with the following words:

"Because of the extraordinarily rich paleontological heritage of the State of Oklahoma, the Legislature hereby declares Saurophaganax Maximus to be the State Fossil of Oklahoma. This spectacular dinosaur, the 'greatest king of reptile eaters', once roamed this great land. It is only known from Oklahoma and has surpassed the Tyrannosaurus rex, the 'king of the dinosaurs', as the greatest predator of earth’s history."

We don't want no puny critter representing us, ha! Surpassing T. rex! And if you want to check it out, look no further than the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, where on the south campus you can see:

"The centerpiece exhibit in the Hall of Ancient Life, the Jones Family 'Clash of the Titans,' [which] shows an encounter between Oklahoma's largest Jurassic animals - the plant-eating sauropod Apatosaurus, which, at more than 93 feet long, is the largest of its kind in the world, and the carnivorous theropod Saurophaganax maximus, the largest of the Jurassic predators."

There's also a mammoth or two, and we'll take a look at how they're presented as well. Feel free to take a field trip of your own and get an early feel for what you think about all this!

If you'd like to explore dinosaurs as modern totems in greater detail, there's no better guide than W.J.T. Mitchell in The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. Here's an interview with him about the book that will give you a sense of what kinds of questions scholars ask about popular phenomena like these and how they go about theorizing the answers. And there's a chapter excerpt as well: the counter-intuitive, "Why Children Hate Dinosaurs." Were you a dinosaur fan, foe, or indifferent to all the hoopla? Still feel the same today as an adult? Stay tuned, and we'll find out more from each of you.
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For more: How do you think the general public view science/paleontology in your country? At paleontologist David Hone's public forum website at DinoBase, he asked the question and you can read the answers given by various scientists. For a quick piece on Oklahoma's dinosaurs, here's a report from News9 by Christian Price, "Oklahoma's First Residents" -- and note that down on the right side of the page in the green sidebar there are some nice video links. And will the whole king of beasts tag become extinct?: see the BBC's report, "T. rex: Warrior or Wimp?" 

Image: Advertising from the producers, at http://www.zrock.com/zforum/about1044.html

science in the everyday world

Usually scholarly articles are hidden behind subscription walls, so it’s nice to be able to share a recent piece that I wrote with Karen Rader that is open access, courtesy of Isis (the flagship journal of the History of Science Society) and the University of Chicago Press: "Science in the Everyday World: Why the History of Science Matters" (full text or .pdf). The essay is part of a set of articles that takes on the question of whether or not research in history of science might be of any value for working scientists, as opposed to an activity that is simply of interest to other historians. As explained in the introductory essay (full text or .pdf) to this "Focus Section," the impetus for this topic came from two scholars who have long been involved with thinking hard about this question, and who have worked closely with scientists: Jane Maienschein (currently president of the History of Science Society) and George Smith (who was director of the former Dibner Institute at MIT, which housed a library and funded fellowships in historical research). They brought together a group of two-dozen or so of us for a week-long workshop at Woods Hole, which then gave rise to these thinkpieces. Jane and George charged us with the task of writing our essays for scientists as our primary audience, rather than historians, even though they would be appearing in the pages of a history of science journal. This isn’t as strange an idea as it might sound at first, because of the fact that these essays would be open access and thus easy for anyone to retrieve and circulate, increasing the odds that discussions might follow beyond the normal circle of historians of science.

I’ve been off writing a book, but already there’s been some discussions started – which is a great credit to Jane, George, and Bernie Lightman, the editor of Isis who greenlighted this Focus section – and so while I’m taking a quick breather before diving back into writing chapters, I wanted to expand a bit on some of what has been raised in response to our contribution on popular culture (there are links to that commentary at the bottom of this post – if you know of others, just send them along and I’ll update this page). In addition, we’ve heard from colleagues that the essay will be useful for teaching interdisciplinary classes – that’s great news! And Karen will also be posting some further thoughts below in the comments, so be sure to take a look.

We had a head-start on thinking about how to present our topic to scientists because so many of the participants in the Woods Hole workshop do science, which included such formidable figures as a Nobel Prize- winning physicist (yes, really!) and the head honcho of one of the National Science Foundation’s Directorates. (I know I can speak for both Karen and myself on this point: that we really appreciate the ideas that were generated by all of the workshop participants in helping us think through different dimensions of the popular culture question, and also would send a big vote of appreciation to the third member of our "popular culture & scientists" mini-group, Bernie Lightman.)

One thing we knew we had to do in our essay was to present some of the backstory of why historians of science study popular science, and where we’re at today, since we couldn’t presume that a scientist would be as familiar as we are, say, with debates over "the deficit model," or the classic Cooter and Pumfrey article, or the state-of-the-art work being done in Victorian science and popular culture. We also chose two 20^th -century areas to focus on, one based on Karen’s on-going research on science museums, and a second from mine on images of "the intimate scientist" in more ephemeral forms of mass media (magazine articles and television shows). I see each of the sections in the essay as exemplifying a common emphasis across time and place (even as they diverge in important ways): that is, an insistence, on the part of public audiences, on seeing science as a humanistic activity, with important light to shed on questions of personal and cultural meaning, even as science is at the same time based on technical, experimental, and quantitative practices. As evidenced in these popular domains, the search for scientific knowledge is deeply-implicated in philosophical questions that people are concerned about, and want to discuss: How do we know when we know things? How is truth defined? How should we expect nature to behave? What does it mean to say that something is natural or unnatural? What is a human being? How are human beings different from animals? From machines? What relationships make society possible? What is our place in the universe? . . .well, you get the idea.

So I would say that the first answer to the question of what value research in science and popular culture might offer to scientists is that the study of popular discourse demonstrates the existence of a persistent challenge to the idea that science is a powerful but (merely) technical activity in which various creative individuals spend time trying to unlock empirical puzzles so as to understand and control nature – leaving "cultural meanings" as downstream epiphenomena that are separate from the practice of science, and thus of no relevant concern to practitioners, who simply wish to get on with their jobs. In short, from the vantage point of various publics there is no humanities/science split: science is humanistic. What happens, then, when an insistence on thinking about science humanistically in the public sphere runs up against professional norms that privilege presenting science as a technical activity (a body of problem sets, methods, results, further questions)? I believe that a number of ramifications follow (hence, the chapters of that book I’m writing that I need to get back to :-) but in the compass of this short, suggestive reflective essay in Isis, we propose at least one: that you get a pattern of unresolved tensions that characterize relations between science and the public in American culture today, despite the high esteem in which science is held generally.

If this vernacular discourse about the humanistic aspects of science exists, and if it doesn’t match the expectations of the professional community about how they would prefer to conduct a public discussion of scientific facts, then how might understanding this history be helpful to scientists? We offer a prescriptive answer: scientists should think about listening to this conversation and participating in it. I know, I know – who are we, as mere historians, to be so forward as to tell scientists what to do? Well, remember, that was what we were asked by our workshop conveners to do: to be so bold as to venture an historically considered opinion! So, why should scientists do this? Well, the most straightforward answer is that we do not believe that the tensions that emerge between these two competing approaches can be worked through successfully if: scientists don’t take more seriously the commentary on the scientific enterprise that circulates in the public domain; if they don’t recognize how crucial that the discussions of the humanistic dimensions of scientific activity are in this regard; and if they don’t begin thinking about how they themselves can engage as participants in public discourse and also think about how to engage the public as participants in science. In large part, because those who run the scientific enterprise are the ones who set the terms of access, that is why, like it or not, the burden is on the scientific community. Where to start? One method has been to call upon the sociologists to run surveys of public opinion and do related research and to use these results to provide insight into what the public is thinking and also about how best "to reach" the public (see, for example, the sections on "Public Attitudes and Understanding" in the NSF Science and Engineering Indicators reports, which come out every two years. Here is the one for 2008.). In my view, that only gets you so far, and in the essay a key argument of ours is that the analytical tools of a humanistic discipline like history are crucial components to understanding the terrain of popular culture, which serves as an "intellectual commons" for commentary by non-experts on the scientific enterprise.

Certainly, there are mediating infrastructures that have grown up during the twentieth century to deal with these issues – specifically, science journalists, science communicators, and science educators – and there are certainly some scientists who even find it worthwhile (or at least useful) to engage with these mediators. In our essay, however, we didn’t include this aspect of the question of science and the public simply because we believe that the question of popular culture encompasses a much wider set of questions, topics, and dimensions in terms of the circulation of scientific knowledge than do traditional definitions of what constitutes science communication. There is a tendency on the part of scientists, when thinking about science communication, to pose inquiry in terms of what the best practices might be to follow in order that scientists can most effectively convey their views to the public, so that the public has an understanding that is as close as possible to that of the scientists who are seeking to deliver information from origination point A (them) to destination point B (the public). In short, typically they look to research in science communication to learn how to clarify and amplify the scientist’s voice. Alternatively, analysis from the vantage point of the history of popular culture suggests that there would be value in scientists thinking of themselves not only as points of origin for communication but as destination points as well. The argument in our article is that scientists need to think not only about what they want to say, and how to say (frame?) it, but to think also about why (and how) they should listen to what non-experts have to say to them. At heart, this is an issue in the politics of knowledge, and the ways in which those politics stunt or facilitate democratic participation.

What are the possible ramifications of this listening exercise? That is really the point at which we ended the essay, because we would only know what new sets of questions would be opened up if scientists chose to take up this issue. To spell it out in a bit more detail: What if, in listening to the public’s questions and answers about humanistic science, scientists find that this discussion challenges current ways of doing business? How would scientists respond to this circumstance? If we reach a crossroads in which values and expectations diverge, what consequences are we willing to accept given which directions are taken? It is the case that the essay doesn’t lay out a blueprint or mount a manifesto about what comes next. But just getting to that starting point seems plenty big enough of an obstacle to me. (In the British and European contexts there are quite explicit debates on these political questions – for an excellent analysis, I recommend Mark Elam and Margareta Bertilsson, "Consuming, Engaging and Confronting Science: The Emerging Dimensions of Scientific Citizenship," European Journal of Social Theory, 2003, 6:233-251; abstract.)

Do circuits of communication currently exist outward from science to the public? – indeed, and blogs are certainly a new form of this outreach as some of the commentary to our piece suggest. And yet: to what extent does this outreach consist of listening to non-experts as well as broadcasting to them? That’s one question that I think should be asked much more often than it is, and that’s the one we put forward in our essay. In the end, is this question about public engagement only of relevance for the scientific community? No! Each year that I have been an historian of science I have become more and more concerned with the distance that exists between historians of science and the public, and that’s what I spend most of my time thinking about (see, for example, my 2005 plenary address to the joint meeting of the History of Science Society and the Society for the History of Technology: "'What Have We to Do with Mr. Everyman, or He with Us?’: Reflections on Professionalism, the Public and the Digital Age.") Professionalization and specialization pose difficult problems for the healthy functioning of a democratic society, and if experts insist on engaging only with other experts then the promise of democracy will be a hollow one.
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For more: Here are links to discussions that began about our piece in the blogosphere and that prompted some of what I've written above: see Will Thomas at ether wave propaganda; Michael Robinson at time to eat the dogs; and Alexis Turner at red-headed stepchild. More general discussions can be found by Benjamin Cohen at the world's fair and by John Lynch at stranger fruit (which also includes links to further discussions). 

Image: A bit of science that circulated in the everyday world, evoking "the intimate scientist": an autographed copy of the December 1965 issue of National Geographic with Jane Goodall on the cover, which also carries a streamer promoting the television special. From andycarvin's photostream at flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andycarvin/2518666389/

arrows to atoms: 1957 and all that

I came across a large display model of this stamp a while back and got curious about it: I'm an historian of science at the University of Oklahoma, and the whole "arrows to atoms" motif as the state's semi-centennial motto came as a surprise to me. Not ever having thought of my adopted home state as particularly nuclear (next door New Mexico, on the other hand, yes!) -- especially as a key marker of state identity -- I wondered what the connection was. The advance of military technology from one form of indigenous American offensive thrust to a later version? New ways of picturing "Boomer Sooner"??? A timely shout-out to 50s rocker extraordinaire, Wanda Jackson -- Oklahoma's gift to rockabilly and female sass -- whose 1957 rendition of "Fujiyama Mama" was a cultural high point? (sample lyric: Well you can say I'm crazy, so deaf and dumb! / But I can cause destruction just like the atom bomb!). For more, see the always on-top-of-it conelrad, in their "Atomic Platters" section (and to hear the song itself, listen to this radio track.)

It turns out that this was one of the promotional themes for the Semi-Centennial Exposition, the Oklahomarama -- where you could visit the "Foodarama," a "Motorama," an "International Photorama," and "Soonerama Land," according to the Oklahoma Historical Society: you just knew Oklahoma was on the verge of something big with that many "ramas" going on, right?  But what about the atoms? That had a newsy hook -- the award of a 16-ton "nuclear reactor for teaching purposes" to Oklahoma State University -- but it also seems to have had a more expansive interpretation as well, that of crossing the threshold of two "frontiers": as the New York Times put it, "an arrow, to represent Oklahoma's redskin frontier, and a variation of the familiar emblem which symbolizes atomic energy, to suggest 'new frontiers'" (March 24, 1957, p. 135). There was a special exhibit on "The World of Tomorrow" that featured atomic power, and the atomic spirit was made concrete in the form of a 200-foot tower (an arrow pointing upward to: tomorrow? space? heaven?) with a silhouette of Oklahoma's border contained within a giant (outdated) solar system model of "an orbit of golden atoms" which lit up at night (this and more described in the May-June 1957 issue of Oklahoma Today, the Semi-Centennial Souvenir edition.)

It turns out that the emphasis on atomic power was more than just a clever way to hitch Oklahoma's wagon to a radiant symbol of the new horizon, but that the wagon was being driven by corporate and civic leaders who were certain that Oklahoma could capitalize on the changing scientific landscape and get in on the ground floor of a new technology that would bring wealth and prosperity to an undercapitalized state, one of the new kids on the block: hence the creation of the "Frontiers of Science Foundation" in 1956 by Dean A. McGee (of energy industry giant Kerr-McGee -- they were the first oil company, in 1952, to mine uranium and they were the nuclear leader in Oklahoma); E.K. Gaylord, the powerful media boss and publisher of OKC's family-owned newspaper, the Oklahoman; Stanley Draper, manager of the city's Chamber of Commerce; and James E. Webb, who had ties to Washington DC due to his stints as U.S. Director of the Budget and Undersecretary of State under President Harry Truman, currently Chairman of the Board of Republic Supply Co. (a division of Kerr-McGee). The Foundation sponsored a "year-long, full time, all-expense-paid refresher-type-course seminar for high school science teachers" and "was first in the nation to go into a statewide testing program to identify youngsters of outstanding ability," reported an article in Oklahoma Today in Spring of 1958. They explained to their readers that this group, driven by a "strange, new, fascinating vision of a New West and the New Frontier of the Mind," had flown around the country making contacts, soliciting advice, and that there was:

"hardly a major nuclear plant, research center or policy-shaping government body in America which hasn't been literally overwhelmed by this 'big bunch of men from Oklahoma' who came dropping in out of the sky to ask the questions the scientists have been so eager -- and fighting so much public apathy elsewhere -- to answer."

Given the Foundation's mission, it is clear how pleased they were to focus the Semi-Centennial Exposition around their aims, which included a "Frontiers of Science" exhibit of their own and an International Science Symposium. The souvenir Oklahoma Today issue noted with pride that "an actual replica of the Earth Satellite, a model of the Vanguard Rocket to be used in launching the famed satellite, and a Solar Battery in operation" would be key draws for the Frontiers of Science exhibit. The Exposition was scheduled from mid-June through early July of 1957 -- after reading about the Vanguard display, I figured it must have been an incredible let-down a few months later to hear about the US being pre-empted by the Sputnik launch in October of that year, and then of the inability of the US to get a satellite up to answer Sputnik and then Sputnik 2 -- the Vanguard attempt blew up on the launch pad, prompting jeers of "Flopnik" and the like.

But that would be to underestimate the boosterism and savvy of the FofSF bunch! They argued that Sputnik --  "the greatest challenge facing Western Civilization" -- was not to be feared, given that the good guys in white cowboy hats had everybody's back:

"Some have wondered why, after Sputnik went up, President Eisenhower happened to select Oklahoma as the site for his sole major address away from Washington to reassure a worried nation. It was no accident. It was basically a tribute to a small group of Oklahomans who had quietly started three years previous, well in advance of any other state, to fuel up a rocket-powered wagon train out of the New West."

Because of the activities of the FofSF:

"half-a-hundred of the [scientists] whose names have since become almost as familiar headliners as Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield had come flying into Oklahoma from all over the globe for an endless series of lectures, conferences, inspection tours. Men like Dr. Vannevar Bush, considered the 'father' of modern American science; Dr. James R. Killian, M.I.T. president now President Eisenhower's top scientific advisor. . . [all of this had become so common that] the recent visit of one of the greatest scientists of his age, Dr. Niels Bohr, hardly provoked more among the general public than a pleasant nod of recognition. Where a few years back he might have been classed in the same category with a man from Mars, he was now viewed simply, with respect, as one of the 'home folks.'"

I would have liked to have seen a comparison by our state's leaders of where we had landed in terms of our aspirations from the Semi-Centennial to the just-celebrated Centennial. I'm sure that back in the '50s and '60s the efforts of the FofSF helped to identify individuals to help staff a new scientific workforce (and certainly all of this seemed to help James E. Webb, who ended up as the head of NASA), but how it all worked out educationally for future generations seems a mixed-bag from my end. Certainly, I've taught a number of students who had innovative science teachers in high school, but I've heard earfuls over the years from the majority of students who have a long list of grievances about how deficient their science classes were. Maybe 1957 is not so far ago, after all.

And then there's a little matter of a note that President Eisenhower made in that national security speech in OKC, where he called for Americans to close the education gap with the Soviets. He stated that:

"Young people now in college must be equipped to live in the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles. However, what will then be needed is not just engineers and scientists, but a people who will keep their heads, and, in every field, leaders who can meet intricate human problems with wisdom and courage. In short, we will need not only Einsteins and Steinmetzes, but Washingtons, and Emersons."

We hear much the same rhetoric in these parts today about the need for better science education, in pursuit of economic competitiveness and national security. Not so much, however, about the need for Emersons. Maybe that was too radical for 1957. . . and for today.

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For more: The city of Tulsa felt left out of all the atomic celebration hoo-ha in OKC, and came up with a twist of their own for a Tulsarama celebration: they would bury a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere [classic photo here] and assorted memorabilia in an atomic-attack-proof vault, to be dug up later for Oklahoma's Centennial celebration in 2007. When the car was retrieved last year, it turned out that two feet of standing water had rusted the car straight through [must-see photo] -- guess it wouldn't have survived a nuclear explosion! (A film reel of the American Petroleum Institute's promotional video, Destination Earth did make it through, though -- here's the scoop. All this via Telstar Logistics, a whole adventure in itself.)

Images: The postage stamp image can be found at http://www.1847usa.com/identify/1950s/1957.htm and the other two at the Oklahoma Historical Society's webpage for the Semi-Centennial celebration, http://www.okhistory.org/semicentennial.html.

flotsam and jetsam and historical memories

1953: Midnight Fireball Hits Bay -- UFO Near Miss???? No, the image isn't a real historic boardwalk handbill from Antiques Roadshow but one more bit of McMilleniana (as are the ones below and to the right) -- they're actually banners made in 2004 for the Santa Monica Pier in California for a public art project that took its inspiration from "the facts, folklore, myths, and legends of the Pier's early history," with the images "representing historical events that may -- or may not-- have actually occurred." McMillen's banners, along with those of artist Steve Galloway, were printed on vinyl and hung out on light poles on the boardwalk, flickering in and out of view of visitors as they strolled along the Pier entertaining themselves. (There are more than two dozen, and each one of them is really fun and clever... very much in keeping with a characterization that McMillen used in another context about an art project of his: "all part of an open-ended narrative, a carnival for the curious.")

My third take-away lesson from the world of art for myself as an historian of science (there is a first one -- "trying to make the (seemingly) ephemeral visible". . . and a second one -- "of crocodelephants and category confusions") as seen through the envisionings of Los Angeles artists Sam Rodia and Michael C. McMillen is related to the idea of artistic installations: art in the wild, out in the public square. McMillen's banners for the Pier are an exuberant wave of the hand, inviting those who encounter them to take them in -- maybe do a double-take -- and respond as might be, maybe with amusement or bemusement, or in sparking off a train-of-associations, or drifting in and out of a game of detecting how close to historical reality the "commemorative" homages are. 

The artist initiates a conversation, drawing on the representations and forms and idioms of everyday life, and provides an opportunity for engagement in a way that brings the specialist or expert (the artist) into an inviting -- if brief -- relationship with ordinary folk, casual passers-by. The Pier's visitors didn't have to possess the right connections to enter the home of a wealthy collector who owns an artpiece only seen by invitation, or even to venture into a museum gallery that is the art world's home turf: here, installation art, as public art in its most open form, takes up residence within a commonplace that offers the possibility for an interplay between "experts" and "laity" in a way that neither condescends nor intimidates. The third lesson, then, is of how venturing out beyond professional confines has so much potential: of teaching ourselves as we improvise new forms of communication, in ways that offer different kinds of connections and opportunities for imagination and reflection. And that's why I'm here on the web, diving into the area of science and popular culture, trying to figure out how to be a digital historian of science: putting out a few banners to fly in the public square. Its time to learn how to do history of science in the wild, not simply caretake it within the neatly trimmed hedges and rows of academic propriety.

McMillen's banners are also a wonderful nudge in and of themselves to speculate about the flotsam and jetsam of science and popular culture. UFOS streaking down into the sea, giant squid breaking the surface and upending an unwary boater, late-Victorian submarine steamers illuminating the murky depths: they're all wonderful evocations of the idea of mysteries that lurk so often at the heart of popular culture phenomena, with the ocean being a particularly apt emblematic prompt. In fact these three "historical" posters offer more than just apt symbolic representations of recurring popular symbols -- they intersect with real artifacts as well, in which connecting the dots begins to reveal possible patterns of culture. If not a real-world UFO sighting, well there was the 1953 movie, Phantom from Space ("Million Monkey Theater" provides a sharp narrative and commentary) in which an alien being crashes into the ocean off of Santa Monica. Jules Verne, in the 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, gives us both a Victorian submersible and a giant squid, featured as well in the 1954 film by Disney. Off the coast of Santa Monica you can spy Catalina Island twenty-seven miles away, where (as the locals tell it) the glass-bottom boat was invented in the late-19th century to take advantage of the clear waters and abundant sealife as a novel tourist attraction-- not quite the gothic hulk of McMillen's imagining, but in 1906 you could experience a variant of the Vernian aquatic dreamscape by touring Catalina's "undersea gardens" via glass-bottom boat. Of course, Catalina being a tinsel-town playground, the tourist craft gets its own star treatment in the Doris Day movie from 1966, The Glass Bottom Boat (with Day as a NASA employee and occasional mermaid...there are interesting images of scientists to consider in this comic film). With just this brief tour, we've probably discovered at least a couple of relevant items worthy of study that are historical obscurities for most by now.

It's unlikely that a rampaging squid actually tormented a bay-dweller in 1949 as recorded on the second banner, but Hollywood, just down the road, produced The Lady Takes a Sailor that year with Jane Wyman (directed by Michael Curtiz) where an octopus apparently figures into the narrative, although it's an underwater vehicle that breaks the surface and upends her sailboat -- and, interestingly, just two years post-Roswell, the plot features a government cover-up of secret experiments (extending to messing with civilians' heads and reputations) involving a submarine tractor (bringing together, in a loose but ever more thickly woven web, echoes of ufology, troublesome cephalopods, and novel deepsea machines :-) Of course, nasty squids/octopi received iconic treatment at the movies during the cold war period in Disney's 20,000 Leagues and It Came from Beneath the Sea ("it" being a six-armed octopus that attacked San Francisco, courtesy of Ray Harryhausen) from 1955 and in the 1961 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, directed by Irwin Allen (I actually saw one of these as a kid -- I think the third one -- at Catalina's movie theater at the Avalon Casino, after having had my first tour in a glass-bottom boat. . . I can still see the vague form of a giant octopus in my mind's-eye today, it scared me that much!). Of course, giant squid are among the most durable popular culture themes and are still a big draw, being that they're so elusive -- they were only recently caught live on video in 2005.

A fascinating late-19th century California seaside connection is a science fiction short story that appeared in a periodical called The Californian in December of 1893. Entitled "A Submarine Christmas" [via Google Books], the fantastic tale by Thomas R. Caldwell shamelessly draws from Verne, but is a surprisingly fresh and up-to-date look for its time at marine zoology. The plot involves an inventor of a submarine research vessel who travels to Avalon Bay at Catalina Island to test it out, and of his intrepid friend from the East Coast who joins him for assorted undersea adventures, including a near-fatal encounter with a "giant cuttle-fish (Architeuthis), a monster at least seventy feet in length. . . Its arms were thrown about the boat: its uncanny black eyes glowing like huge plates in the glare of the search lights" (accompanied by an excellent illustration). Fortunately for the harried explorers, it was all a dream! But the 1906 piscatorial machine of the Santa Monica Pier banner would look remarkably apt as an illustration for the 1893 story; certainly Thomas R. Caldwell would have felt right at home! And, again, we've probably discovered at least a couple of relevant items here that are historical obscurities for most by now, simply by using the 2004 banner imaginings by McMillen as jumping-off points.

Making the (seemingly) ephemeral visible is part of what the art world can teach us humanists, and artists can also inspire ideas about how to visualize a carnival for the curious -- experimenting outside the petri dish -- needed, especially, when humanism becomes tinged with scientism. Not only that, but they can send us off into cultural scavenger hunts that turn flotsam and jetsam into useful things to think with and that point toward historical work that needs doing.

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Images: All from the image gallery at http://arts.santa-monica.org/gallery/paintings/PierBanners/.

of crocodelephants and category confusions

So how can you make something that is as wide as a (modest) household lot and as high as 100 feet and has the heft of hundreds (thousands?) of cubic yards of steel and cement invisible? As I wrote last time, in what it seems now was the first installment of lessons for science and popular culture from art, it's a very simple sleight of hand: leave it unclassified. As Calvin Trillin remarked in the New Yorker in 1965 about what came to be known as Sam Rodia's Watts Towers in south-central Los Angeles, "If a man who has not labelled himself an artist happens to produce a work of art, he is likely to cause a lot of confusion and inconvenience." The problem in classification had been created through the decades-long labor of an Italian immigrant who, the correspondent from NYC explained, "constructed  a dream-like complex of openwork towers . . . and encrusted them with a sparkling mosaic, composed mainly of what had once been refuse." A book without a Library of Congress call number can't be shelved, and may as well not exist -- you won't find it in the art section. Of course, even if forced by circumstances to classify something that is confusing and inconvenient and made out of refuse, we can assign it to a category that still renders it hard to see: say, label it as popular culture, not Art. In the part of the scholarly map where I work, the stuff that relates to science but that isn't produced by a scientist also creates category problems: if it's stuck in the ephemeral -- the category of "popular culture" -- it is hard for professional historians of science to see it (or to take it seriously). If it's not scientist-produced and approved -- and therefore solid and visible -- then why would a historian of science study it? Another category problem.

About a decade after I'd seen the Watts Towers, I received another lesson in art, from another Los Angeles artist who makes particular use of the discarded junk of modern society in creating his sculptures and installations, Michael C. McMillen (that's one of his pieces at the top -- "The Box of All Knowledge," from 1997 -- which, by the way, can't be opened. So what is in it???) To the left is one of his recycled pieces on the cover of "Folksongs for a Nuclear Village," a Shadowfax album -- the piece's title translates as "In the Middle of Our Life's Journey," a line taken from the opening of The Divine Comedy. As a post-Sputnik youngster McMillen was very involved with tinkering and with science -- reading Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, working in a homemade chemistry lab behind his grandfather's workshop -- and he majored in science in college before switching to art his sophomore year (for this and more, see an interview from 2002 titled "The Alchemy of Things"). His artworks often reference technology and science and history. In capturing the nature of his work from this time period Elenore Welles suggested that:

Fifteen years' experience building models for Hollywood movies [such as Blade Runner] and an abiding love of craftsmanship is visible in the amount of technical finesse applied to these intricate constructions. McMillen's passion for junk is evidenced in the huge stockpile in his backyard. Items such as plumbing valves, door hinges or typewriter keys provide impetus for his conceptual fecundity. He likes his process to be ongoing and interactive. In fact, works often appear to be in an evolving state. The viewer is brought into the process of invention and discovery.

McMillen juxtaposes objects to evoke associations and to investigate the fine line between illusion and fiction. The transmutation of matter, how it disintegrates and is reborn, inspires his art. Scientific logic and the nature of matter are terrains that often remain obscure. But he attempts to demythologize them. In the process of building his imagery he plays with the psychology of perception and the ideas those images might convey.

As someone who was set to return to graduate school (not to study cognitive psychology, like before, but history of science instead) I loved visiting his installations and gallery shows, which through the richness of the juxtapositions and layerings and their surprises and resonances raised all kinds of interesting questions about the meaning of science and technology as past and present for me. The artworks were always the effort of one mind seeking to convey ideas and emotions to other minds, but without dictating results, leaving room for viewers to discover and interpret and reimagine. McMillen's installations were partnerships with his visitors, sometimes literally, as when their actions became part of the exhibit themselves. He once remarked that he "wants viewers to interpret his art according to their own experiences. . . 'I suggest, rather than shout.'" (from Patricia Hamilton, Michael C. McMillen: Hermetic Landscapes, 1988).

Suggesting, rather than shouting. . . this was part of what I loved about these carefully constructed worlds of McMillen's and why they seemed so engaging to me. And here's this second lesson I learned, although it has caused me no end of uneasiness in becoming an academic historian of science. Our disciplinary rhetoric, our blunt-edged forms of persuasion such as the scholarly monograph and the professional article, are built on an argumentative platform that seeks to marshal evidence and drive home a thesis, in order to engage almost in a battle with the minds of readers to convince them that they must understand what we are writing about in just this one way. Especially within the history of science, which frequently seeks to emulate the sciences themselves, our histories often proceed as if they were clever, neatly contained scientific experiments, in which we deploy independent variables to find out if our hypothesis is judged to prevail or not. This professional mode was coming up against a set of changing dynamics, however -- something that cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed in 1983: that a "blurring of genres" was occurring within intellectual life, with "many social scientists hav[ing] turned away from a laws and instances ideal of explanation toward a cases and interpretations one, looking less for the sort of thing that connects planets and pendulums and more for the sort that connects chrysanthemums and swords." He characterized this shift as a contemporary "refiguration of social thought," summing it up in this way: "something is happening to the way we think about the way we think." I could see this shift all around me, as with McMillen's installations. But Geertz's shift didn't seem all that real when dealing with the print culture of academia in which I was being trained for.

So, what I wondered from what artists such as McMillen had taught me is this: what does the rhetoric look like for less martial, less adversarial histories of science? Why not histories of science that instead view the reader as a partner in meaning-making, that strive to evoke, and broaden, and recalibrate, and suggest, and raise possibilities rather than seek to have the last word (reject the null hypothesis)? What category would this kind of history of science fall into, this kind of art-inflected narrative, one based on picking up the flotsam and jetsam discarded by the mainstream, reworking it, reconsidering it, recategorizing it, blurring genres?

I left California in 1994 for Oklahoma, and haven't been able to follow McMillen's work in person, although the web makes possible a bit of visiting at several removes. And it's a delight to see that among the numerous and fascinating turnings he's taken that he's found unusual ways to bring his reflections on humans and history and science and technology to new and different locations: whether just this last year at the San Jose Museum of Art, for their group exhibition on "Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon". . . or CalTech, with "Dr. Crump's Inductive Geo-Imaging Mobile Laboratory (Field Unit 1)" (pictured to the left, with the artist; for the link, you'll need to scroll down), where visitors would see an "ever-evolving archive of artifacts" from the research being conducted of, he revealed, a series of buried chambers from an underground abandoned laboratory, sealed off over seventy years before. . .or Geologica 42, at the LA Metro Fillmore station . . . or the joint experiment by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Naturalis (the Netherlands' national Natural History Museum in Leiden) that he and a handful of other artists participated in, "Conversations: Nature and the City," featuring his Crocodelephant Incognitus Giganticus and the "The Flying Dutchman" (the porpoise skeletons with schooner sails above to the right). When the exhibit set up in Leiden a real scientist came by to look over the artists' pieces and deliver a prouncement: Philip Campbell, an astrophysicist and editor-in-chief of Nature (his review, "Conceits and Provocations: Artists Reveal a Variety of Responses to the Contents of a Natural-History Museum," appeared in the 16 November 2006 issue, p. 274). His final conclusion about artists in a museum context is that: "Cumbersome attempts by artists to pose philosophical questions in a visual form tend to smack of conceit, rather than stimulate," although he allows that the closer that the artists get to "artfulness" -- which he defines as "sheer visual creativity" -- the better they do. I wish an historian of science had also reviewed the exhibition, to see what further conversations might have resulted!

Campbell finds McMillen coming off somewhat better in his mind than did some of the others, giving him an evaluation of being "conceptually more substantive" and displaying a "sense of visual play that adds to the cultural value of the specimens." He also seems to endorse the statement in the organizers' supplementary material that "McMillen's creativity is closer to the way our brains work than we might want to admit." McMillen himself speaks of his Naturalis creations, which play off of nature's creations, as "all part of an open-ended narrative, a carnival for the curious." Perhaps this is what leads "print" historians like me (who spend too much time haunting artists' venues?) to venture out into the digital world -- searching for a contemporary space that allows room to mount a carnival for the curious with open-ended narratives allowed, even necessary. Ephemeral? It depends on what categories we navigate by . . .

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For more: McMillen's most well-known Los Angeles installation is the fascinating "Central Meridian" (and here) which is part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. If you're ever visiting LA don't miss it (or the Watts Towers)! You can also see a quick YouTube hit of a recent installation at Cincinnati's UnMuseum, Speed's Place. For more background on the artist, see this oral history interview that the Smithsonian Institution conducted with McMillen in 1997. Clifford Geertz's essay, "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought" is from his Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology; the essay was first published in 1980 in American Scholar.

Images: The Box of All Knowledge (photo by Brian Forrest) accompanies an essay on McMillen at http://artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles1997/Articles0697/MMcMillen.html; the album cover is at wikipedia; the porpoises image is from the Natural History Museum of LA County website for the exhibit, at http://www.nhm.org/Conversations_LA_Leiden/?artist=mcmillen; and the CalTech lab accompanies an article by Michael Rogers, "When Art and Science Collude," at http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/caltechnews/articles/v38/collude.html.

trying to make the (seemingly) ephemeral visible

Why would anyone who is an historian of science spend their time thinking and researching and writing and lecturing about science and popular culture? Isn't it a sideshow to the real stuff, the important stuff: professional science? Recently, I found myself answering a variation on this question from someone who had come to a talk I was giving to an academic audience, and somewhere along the way of answering, I brought up the issue of cultural gatekeeping -- how specialists in areas like art and literature and music in the early twentieth century would have said that Charles Dickens wasn't "real" literature or jazz wasn't "real" music because it wasn't "real" capital C Culture (how we got the capital C categories is of course an interesting legacy of latter-nineteenth-century intellectual arbiters. For a provocative entry point, see Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America / Harvard U Pr, 1990).

Over the course of the 20th century there has been a widening acceptance within most fields of human activity about what counts as significant, even if it seems to fall within the area of popular culture rather than clearly fitting into what arbiters considered to be high culture, or serious culture. But science is an area that has been much more tenacious in marking out and keeping firm the demarcations between what is seen as important and what has been brushed off as peripheral, tangential, trivial. The cordoning off of science as high culture is an important historical divergence from other cultural areas, in my view, and one worthy of thinking hard about, just like we used to wonder why Charles Dickens couldn't be real literature, or whether or not a quilt could be considered to be a form of artistic expression, even if it covered a bed in someone's home rather than being displayed on a museum's walls.

The example I gave was one that means a great deal to me: an Italian immigrant's set of sculptures that he created in his backyard f rom the 1920s through the 1950s. There are seventeen structures, two of which are towers that reach nearly 100 feet high. They were created out of steel and cement and the discards of everyday life -- broken pottery, tiles, bits of soda and milk of magnesia bottles, and seashells brought to him by neighborhood children.

The towers are located at East 107th street in Los Angeles, and they therefore came to be called the Watts Towers, since that is the neighborhood where its creator, Sabato (known as Sam or Simon) Rodia lived, and where you will still find them today (his name for them was Nuestro Pueblo, or "Our Town"). But you only find them there today because of a demarcation clash that happened in 1959 about whether or not Rodia's towers mattered: in 1957 the City of Los Angeles had ordered them condemned, stating that they were "an unauthorized public hazard" and scheduled them for demolition. A group who had organized to save the towers argued that at the least there should be a stress test, and the city agreed if the group would pay for it. As Off the Map, a site on visionary art, recounts:

If The Watts Towers — built by one man using novel construction methods — could withstand 10,000 pounds of stress,The Towers would be spared. On October 10, 1959, 1,000 supporters held their breath as they watched Rodia’s structure weather — without signs of strain — the equivalent of seventy-six mile-an-hour sustained winds. It was, in fact, the testing apparatus that began to bend. The demolition order was revoked and a year later The Towers were opened to the public for a fifty-cent entry fee.    

I first saw them about 1975, when a high school teacher took us on a tour of cultural artifacts in downtown Los Angeles -- the kind of artifacts that you wouldn't find inside a museum, that is. I was astonished by the towers, by the fact that they were so intricate and so complex -- by the fact that they rose out of a modest urban neighborhood with a kind of nonchalance as if of course every neighborhood should have its local artistic embellishments -- by the fact that they had been created by someone who had no formal training but nevertheless felt compelled to invent and improvise and design and make real the visions inside his head and heart over so many years. But most of all just looking at them and walking around them made me very, very, very happy -- even if there were many things wrong about the world I felt a kind of joy that I could live in a time and place in which they could exist and I could experience them and that we were bound together because I knew I would never forget them. And yet I might never have seen them if a small group of people hadn't argued for their value in order to save them, since the default view saw them as having little value, except, perhaps as a potential nuisance.

What gets left out of the official story, what gets left behind, what gets forgotten, and why . . . that is part of the story of science in the vernacular. And lessons from outside of science itself can help us think about these questions, too . . . but only, of course, if you think of science as a form of culture to begin with.

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For more: There's wikipedia, and the local public television site for information, and a good summation of information on Rodia and the Towers from the documentary by Edward Landler and Brad Byer, I Build the Tower; see also an interesting interview with Landler. And here's Charles Mingus on growing up with the Towers.

Images: The first two are from http://www.wattstowers.us/; the third one is via flickr by bisayan lady; the fourth one is from wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Watts-towers.jpg.