Gowan Dawson

Women, Science and Culture: Science in the Nineteenth-century Periodical

The Victorian periodical press offers unique insights into many diverse areas of nineteenth-century experience, and the complex relations between gender, science and culture in particular, yet it has been consistently marginalized as a primary resource in academic study. The Science in the Nineteenth-century Periodical (SciPer) project at the universities of Sheffield and Leeds is creating a new point of access to a wide range of non-specialist periodicals across the century by means of a fully searchable electronic index. By detailing the entire contents of each journal, and not just those articles that have a clear scientific relevance, it becomes clear that science formed a fundamental and integral part of nineteenth-century culture. The electronic index, moreover, will include hypertext cross-reference links that will allow the user to identify a dialogic pattern of encounters between ostensibly diverse articles, rather than only to browse in a simple chronological mode. By adopting this innovative approach, the SciPer database will reveal the manifold intertextual relations between the fictional works of women writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and the scientific articles that often appeared in the pages of the same magazines, and will show that writers of both sexes and across several different genres actively engaged in vibrant interdisciplinary debates concerning scientific issues in a forum provided by the periodical. Although the SciPer database itself is not specifically focused on issues of gender, the index will include several periodicals aimed explicitly at a female readership and, by providing access to titles still rarely utilized in modern scholarship, it will offer further insights into the important contemporary debates about women and science, as well as the more subtle ways, in which gendered imagery was employed within scientific discourse. This article details some critical findings from Punch , The English Womans Domestic Magazine , Cornhill Magazine and the Review of Reviews .

Paleontology in parts: Richard Owen, William John Broderip, and the serialization of science in early Victorian Britain.

While a great deal of scholarly attention has been given to the publication of serialized novels in early Victorian Britain, there has been hardly any consideration of the no less widespread practice of issuing scientific works in parts and numbers. What scholarship there has been has insisted that scientific part-works operated on entirely different principles from the strategies for maintaining readerly interest that were being developed by serial novelists like Charles Dickens. Deploying the methods of book history, this essay examines the reporting of Richard Owens celebrated paleontological reconstructions from the 1830s and 1840s in the serialized formats of the Proceedings of the Zoological Society, his own History of British Fossil Mammals, and, in particular, the Penny Cyclopaedia. It argues that Owen, along with his close friend William John Broderip, clearly recognized the affective possibilities of the serial format and that they exploited the Penny Cyclopaedias sequential mode of publication to evoke suspense and expectation in their anonymous but collaboratively authored accounts of Owens paleontological researches.

Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries

This Perspective article reflects on the recent launch of ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries’ (http://conscicom.org), a collaboration between the Universities of Oxford and Leicester in partnership with the Natural History Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons, and the Royal Society. It is a multi-strand project, bringing together historians, literary scholars, and contemporary science practitioners, which has been awarded a large grant in the Arts and Humanities Research Councils ‘Science in Culture’ theme. At its heart lie questions about public involvement in science, the amateur/professional divide, and the possibilities of drawing on understanding of the role of journals in the science and information revolution of the nineteenth century in order to enhance science participation in the digital age.

Victorian glassworlds: Glass culture and the imagination 1830-1880

Motion (regarding the BlackBerry wireless device). Unfortunately, the book’s strength — its reliance on data — is also a weakness. Most of the data are peripheral to traditional methods of patent valuation, such as market value, and date from the 1990s, so are only a trailing indicator of patent activity. The book’s conclusions do not adequately reflect recent developments, including US court decisions that have narrowed patent scope, the opensource software movement and global pressures to limit software and medical patents. Patent Failure focuses narrowly on financial value and costs of patents as private-property assets of publicly traded corporations. But patents serve other objectives that deserve greater attention. They are part of a dynamic, global intellectual-property system that drives innovation by balancing the exclusive rights of creators against the ability of others to access and copy creative works. The social benefits of the patent system, as it has evolved over the centuries, include promoting publication as an alternative to secrecy, rewarding investment in research, expanding international trade, allowing individual freedom and control over creative activities, promoting innovation races, helping innovators break into an established market allowing well-managed companies to supplant poorly managed competitors, and facilitating collaboration and technology transfer between public and private organizations. These benefits are undervalued or ignored in the book’s financial calculations, and they contradict its conclusion of patent failure. The book uses lively anecdotes and analogies, but this is ironic because the authors criticize other writers for relying on anecdotal information. And they overstate their case that patents would work better if they were more like real estate or copyright. The recent collapse in the real-estate market suggests that particular system is no panacea. And the authors’ favourable view about the clarity of copyrights in the entertainment industry ignores frequent disputes over who owns rights to movies and music. Patent Failure sets out in the right direction by comparing the corporate benefits of patents to their overall social costs, based on empirical data. And the book’s conclusion may be sound, that the patent system would work better with clearer boundaries defined by patent claims. Ultimately, the book raises good questions, but leaves many unanswered. ■