Tools of Knowledge: Modelling the Creative Communities of the Scientific Instrument Trade, 1550-1914

知识工具：科学仪器贸易创意社区建模，1550-1914 年

• 批准号: AH/T013400/2
• 负责人: Rebekah Higgitt
• 金额: $ 14.73万
• 依托单位: National Museums Scotland
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FT013400%2F2
• 关键词: Tools; Knowledge; Modelling; Creative; Communities

Scientific knowledge has helped shape the modern world. It has responded to and facilitated global exploration and commerce, the industrial revolution and medical understanding. While popular narratives celebrate famous discoveries and scientists, they usually overlook the makers of the technologies on which they relied. Scientific instruments embodied current knowledge and practice, both enabling and constraining our understanding of the world. It is the stories of these artefacts, and of the men and women involved in the trade that produced them, during three and a half centuries, that the 'Tools of Knowledge' project will recover and share.'Tools of Knowledge' will assemble a large volume of diverse data to which it will apply cutting-edge methods of digital analysis. The research will be grounded in the existing Scientific Instrument Makers, Observations and Notes (SIMON) dataset, comprising more than 10,000 records on individual instrument makers and firms from Great Britain and Ireland. To this will be added data from existing legacy databases, collections catalogues and new metallurgical research, as well as material newly extracted from historical texts or generated using advanced digital methods. The aggregated data will be remodelled using semantic knowledge representation, to encode expert understanding of the meaning of this data in a machine-readable form and enable linking across datasets. For the first time, information about people, places, practices, institutions, materials and objects will be accessible for study in combination and at scale. Textual and graphical interfaces, designed to allow the construction of complex and nuanced queries, will allow researchers to dynamically form and test new hypotheses about the relationship between different factors in the lives of the instruments themselves, and the development of the trade.The research enabled by 'Tools of Knowledge' extends across historical periods and spatial scales, to explore how individuals and companies structured their activities, and how urban space and national infrastructure influenced the instrument trade. It is organised around seven Case Studies, tackled by four Co-Is and three researchers. The questions to be investigated stretch back to the manufacture of instruments in the mid-16th century: the sources of raw materials, their trade, and who gained commercial advantage from novel methods of working them. They extend forward through the 18th and 19th centuries to address the geography of the instrument trade (urban, national, global), and the interplay of expertise, company organization, and industrial development. They also encompass how different kinds of instruments - variously used for teaching, experimentation, discovery and regulation - circulated, the impact of their distribution on other industries, and how the trade was perceived by the public at large. A rich panoramic view of a creative and commercial community will emerge, at once broad and detailed, revealing new subjects and compelling stories, and raising public awareness of the complex relationship between the practical, intellectual and commercial activities that underpin the technology of the world we inhabit.Under the leadership of Prof Liba Taub, Director of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, this thirty-month project assembles an interdisciplinary team from the Universities of Cambridge (Dr Boris Jardine, Dr Joshua Nall), Sussex (Dr Alex Butterworth) and Kent (Dr Rebekah Higgitt) with extensive expertise in the history of science, museum curation, digital methods and visualisation design. The project is in partnership with the Science Museum, London, and Royal Museums, Greenwich, holder of the core SIMON database. Using 'triplestore' database technology from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 'Tools of Knowledge' will deliver a persuasive example of Linked Data generating transformative research in a tightly defined field.

科学知识帮助塑造了现代世界。它响应并促进了全球勘探和商业、工业革命和医学理解。虽然流行的叙事庆祝著名的发现和科学家，他们通常忽略了他们所依赖的技术的制造商。科学工具体现了当前的知识和实践，既促进了我们对世界的理解，也限制了我们对世界的理解。这是这些人工制品的故事，以及在三个半世纪中参与生产它们的贸易的男人和女人的故事，“知识工具”项目将恢复和分享。“知识工具”将汇集大量不同的数据，并将应用尖端的数字分析方法。该研究将基于现有的科学仪器制造商，观测和注释（SIMON）数据集，包括来自英国和爱尔兰的个人仪器制造商和公司的10，000多条记录。除此之外，还将增加来自现有遗留数据库、馆藏目录和新冶金研究的数据，以及从历史文本中新提取或使用先进数字方法生成的材料。将使用语义知识表示对汇总数据进行重新建模，以机器可读形式对专家对该数据含义的理解进行编码，并实现数据集之间的链接。关于人、地点、做法、机构、材料和物品的信息将首次可供综合和大规模研究。文本和图形界面，旨在允许构建复杂和细致入微的查询，将使研究人员能够动态地形成和测试新的假设之间的关系，在不同的因素在生活的文书本身，和贸易的发展。研究“知识的工具”所实现的跨越历史时期和空间尺度，探索个人和公司如何结构他们的活动，以及城市空间和国家基础设施如何影响乐器贸易。它围绕七个案例研究，由四个Co-Is和三个研究人员处理。要调查的问题可以追溯到世纪中期的乐器制造：原材料的来源，它们的贸易，以及谁从新的加工方法中获得了商业优势。它们延伸到18世纪和19世纪，以解决工具贸易的地理（城市，国家，全球），以及专业知识，公司组织和工业发展的相互作用。它们还包括不同种类的工具-各种用于教学、实验、发现和管制-如何流通，其流通对其他行业的影响，以及一般公众如何看待这一贸易。展览将展现一个创意和商业社区的丰富全景，既广泛又详细，揭示新的主题和引人入胜的故事，并提高公众对支撑我们生活的世界的技术的实际，知识和商业活动之间的复杂关系的认识。在维普莱科学史博物馆馆长Liba Taub教授的领导下，这个为期30个月的项目集合了来自剑桥大学（Boris Jardine博士、约书亚纳尔博士）、苏塞克斯大学（Alex巴特沃思博士）和肯特大学（Rebekah Higgitt博士）的跨学科团队，他们在科学史、博物馆策展、数字方法和可视化设计方面具有广泛的专业知识。该项目是与伦敦科学博物馆和格林威治皇家博物馆合作进行的，后者是SIMON核心数据库的保持器持有者。利用荷兰皇家艺术与科学学院的“三重存储”数据库技术，“知识工具”将提供一个有说服力的例子，说明关联数据在一个严格定义的领域产生变革性研究。