02 Autumn 2014 Issue 02
In this issue of the Science Museum Group Journal articles include an exploration of the use of theatre in the display of particle physics, a discussion of a research project (and exhibition) re-evaluating the search for longitude, and a description of a participatory process to co-create an electronic music exhibition. Other articles look at what the relationship between Harrison and Short can tell us about the eighteenth-century concept of ‘genius’, and delve into museum collections to unearth extraordinary images and an overlooked scrapbook.
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Editorial
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James Short and John Harrison: personal genius and public knowledge
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Oramics to electronica: investigating lay understandings of the history of technology through a participatory project
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Curating the collider: using place to engage museum visitors with particle physics
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'½ vol. not relevant': The scrapbook of Winifred Penn-Gaskell
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Made real: artifice and accuracy in nineteenth-century scientific illustration
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Science communication in Latin America: what is going on?
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Chronometers, charts, charisma: on histories of longitude
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Review: Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude
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Review: Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century, by Omar W Nasim
Featured content
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Curating the collider: using place to engage museum visitors with particle physics
This article explores the use of reconstructed spaces and immersion at the Science Museum’s recent Collider exhibition. It sets out the challenges of engaging museum audiences with cutting-edge particle physics, describes the techniques adopted and evaluates their success.
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James Short and John Harrison: personal genius and public knowledge
This is a study of the positive relationship between James Short and John Harrison, set in two eighteenth-century contexts: the notion of individual aptitude or ‘genius’ unspoilt by education or training; and the problem of how individual ability might be captured and formulated as public knowledge.
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Made real: artifice and accuracy in nineteenth-century scientific illustration
This essay draws on the Science Museum’s pictorial collections, in particular the excellent holdings of astronomical and meteorological images, in order to look again at the construction of objectivity, this time from the point of view of making and reproducing images.