Issue 1.7
This issue shares citations added to the database in April. If you are someone who is interested in environmental history (broadly conceived) or the communication of science, read on! There is lots here for you.
I can say this because I have scanned the concepts used by the CB staff to tag citations. The concepts are the terms that appear in the little blue bubbles underneath the publication information for each title in the CB. The 2024 book by Maria Rita Fadda, Lingua e Scienza nel secolo delle cose, for instance, was tagged with Women, Popularization, Cosmology, Science and gender, Italian language, Newtonianism, and Physics (see the image below). Fadda’s book came to my attention because “Women” ended up being one of the top six concepts applied to books in April.
Some of the concept tags in the CB’s thesaurus come from older standardized vocabularies, which were carried over into IsisCB Explore. At their weekly meetings, CB staff debate whether to add new tags or revise old ones.
To give you one example, a 2023 article on “The Work of Donald Ewen Cameron: From Psychic Driving to MK Ultra” came up for discussion at a recent meeting of the bibliographic team. The question was whether the concept “psychic driving” was properly captured with the existing tag “Brainwashing.” Should we create another term that better represents different aspects of mind control? Ultimately, the concept structure was left alone, reflecting a conservative bias: desires to change must always be balanced against the need for discoverability and institutional memory. That said, staff will be monitoring ongoing trends and may add specificity in this area in the future.
As I hope this example shows, the CB conceptual taxonomy is structured by the judgments of practitioners in the field. As new sub-literatures are identified and brought into the CB, its conceptual structure has the flexibility to grow and change. The system will become stronger as contributing editors with increasingly diverse interests and expertise join up.
—Judy Kaplan, Editor
Featured Books
These books are all about the senses—tactile, olfactory, and sundry. They cut across the main topics identified in the citations below (environmental and agricultural history, communication and media studies) and all are linked to reviews in the CB database.
Featured Articles
I was surprised to find multiple titles on poetry and medical epistemology among the journal articles in this batch. Here are two examples from different journals that appeared in 2023. I really enjoyed reading these contributions to the literature on scientific communication, which was the top concept indexed in April.
Article Ashleigh Blackwood; Helen Williams (2023) Writing Doctors and Writing Health in the Long Eighteenth Century. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (pp. 3-20).
Citations
Monographs and Edited Volumes
There is an interesting emphasis on interactions between humans and the natural world in the titles below–environmental history, agriculture, animals, and food were among the top concepts applied to titles on this list. Under this umbrella, I note that several authors have devoted their books to a single material, substance, or species: glyphosate, chestnut, ethanol, phosphorus, copper, Matsutake, cotton, sugar, tea, pigs, cigarettes, wheat, palm oil, cows, soy, pit bulls, and the like. These far outweigh histories of particular ideas, people, or places, which are also represented on the list.
Boyce, James. Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens. Icon Books, 2020. ISBN:9781785786501.
Gaines, Susan M. Accidentals. Torrey House Press, 2020. ISBN:9781948814164.
Patota, Giuseppe. Parole di Galileo. Accademia della Crusca, 2023. ISBN:9788833880136.
Purini, Franco. La sezione aurea. Il Mulino, 2024. ISBN:9788815388797.
Rees, Jonathan. Food Adulteration and Food Fraud. Reaktion Books, 2020. ISBN:9781789141948.
Roy, Sumana. How I Became a Tree. Yale University Press, 2021. ISBN:9780274760244.
Torrini, Maurizio. Da Della Porta a Vico. Studi napoletani. Agorà & Co., 2023. ISBN:9791280508539.
Versiero, Marco. Leonardo da Vinci: Le macchine da guerra. Giunti, 2023. ISBN:9788809932166.
Book Chapters
This list seems to cluster around two poles: expensive stuff, on the one hand, discoverable through the tools of business history; and the experiences of people who would have lived without expensive stuff (including books), knowable through the tools of historical archaeology. While these might seem quite different, each offers ways of getting at experiences or dynamics that go beyond what people have had to say explicitly about themselves. Note that the top concepts and places identified below point to a handful of edited volumes. The eight citations linked to Fort St. Joseph, for instance, all come from a single volume.
Arribet-Deroin, Danielle. “The Iron Industry in the Sixteenth Century According to Texts, Images, and Archaeological Remains: The Example of the Glinet Ironworks
Baker, Andrew C. “On the Matter of Enchantment.” Agricultural History 96, no. 1-2 (2022): 262-266. Braden, Peter. “Crafting Rice Assignments.” Agricultural History 97, no. 4 (2023): 628-632. Cornes, Saskia C. C. “Soil as the Archive.” Agricultural History 97, no. 4 (2023): 643-648. Hersey, Mark D. “Material Stories, Old and New.” Agricultural History 96, no. 1-2 (2022): 237-242. Osterud, Grey. “In Memoriam: Mats Morell.” Agricultural History 97, no. 2 (2023): 311-318. Smith-Howard, Kendra. “An Invitation to Dance.” Agricultural History 96, no. 1-2 (2022): 231-236. Uekötter, Frank. “Let’s Talk about Momentum.” Agricultural History 96, no. 1-2 (2022): 267-270. Holder, Justin P. “Poincaré’s Radical Ontology.” HOPOS 13, no. 1 (2023): 151-179. Patton, Lydia . “Editor’s Note.” HOPOS 13, no. 2 (2023): 453-453. Ward, Zina B. “William Whewell, Cluster Theorist of Kinds.” HOPOS 13, no. 2 (2023): 362-386. Hisano, Ai. “Eye Appeal Is Buy Appeal.” Technology and Culture 64, no. 4 (2023): 1235-1247. Welk-Joerger, Nicole . “Maintaining Bovine.” Technology and Culture 64, no. 4 (2023): 1141-1158. Editors. “Editor’s Note.” Business History Review 97, no. 2 (2023): 195-198.Journal Articles
Agricultural History
Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology
Economic History Review
HOPOS
HOST: Journal of History of Science and Technology
Journal of Historical Geography
Science Communication
Technology and Culture
Other journals
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