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

科学知识帮助塑造了现代世界。它响应并促进了全球探索和商业、工业革命和医学理解。虽然流行的叙事颂扬着著名的发现和科学家，但它们通常忽略了它们所依赖的技术的创造者。科学仪器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。“知识工具”项目将恢复和分享这些文物的故事，以及三个半世纪以来从事这些文物生产的男男女女的故事。“知识工具”将汇集大量不同的数据，并应用尖端的数字分析方法。这项研究将以现有的科学仪器制造商，观察和笔记（SIMON）数据集为基础，该数据集包括来自英国和爱尔兰的个体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、收藏目录和新的冶金研究的数据，以及新从历史文本中提取的材料或使用先进的数字方法生成的材料。聚合的数据将使用语义知识表示进行重构，以机器可读的形式编码专家对数据含义的理解，并实现跨数据集的链接。关于人物、地点、习俗、机构、材料和物品的信息将第一次可供组合和大规模研究。文本和图形界面，旨在允许构建复杂和细致的查询，将允许研究人员动态地形成和测试关于仪器本身寿命中不同因素之间关系的新假设，以及贸易的发展。“知识工具”的研究跨越历史时期和空间尺度，探索个人和公司如何组织其活动，以及城市空间和国家基础设施如何影响工具贸易。它围绕7个案例研究展开，由4名联合创始人和3名研究人员负责。要调查的问题可以追溯到16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。他们向前延伸到18和19世纪，以解决仪器贸易的地理（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仪器——用于教学、实验、发现和监管的各种仪器——是如何流通的，它们的分布对其他行业的影响，以及公众如何看待这种贸易。一个丰富的创意和商业社区的全景将出现，既广泛又详细，揭示新的主题和引人入胜的故事，并提高公众对实践，智力和商业活动之间复杂关系的认识，这些活动支撑着我们所居住的世界的技术。在惠普科学史博物馆馆长Liba Taub教授的领导下，这个为期30个月的项目汇集了来自剑桥大学（Boris Jardine博士，Joshua Nall博士），苏塞克斯大学（Alex Butterworth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。该项目与伦敦科学博物馆和格林威治皇家博物馆合作，后者拥有SIMON核心数据库。使用荷兰皇家艺术与科学学院的“triplestore”数据库技术，“知识工具”将提供一个有说服力的关联数据在一个严格定义的领域产生变革性研究的例子。

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.