Skip to content
Menu
Menu
About the Journal
Expand child menu
Submission guidelines
Editorial Board
International Advisory Board
News
Current Issue
Past issues
Open search
Search for:
Submit search query
Close search
20
Autumn 2023
Issue 20
Issue 20 Editorial
Jessica Bradford
Revealing observatory networks through object stories
: Introduction
Rebekah Higgitt
Revealing observatory networks through object stories
: Instrumental networks
Emily Akkermans, Kelley Wilder and Samantha Thompson
Revealing observatory networks through object stories
: Object itineraries
Ileana Chinnici, Louise E Devoy and Fernando B Figueiredo
Revealing observatory networks through object stories
: Observatory audiences
Rebekah Higgitt, Susana Biro and Pedro M P Raposo
Photography and electroplate in 1840s Birmingham
Jo Gane
1876 and All That: the ‘Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus’ as a case study in crowd-sourced international public science
Graeme Gooday, Alexander King and Nela Spurna
Tinkering with nature: craft, domesticity and female labour in F Percy Smith’s ‘Data’ notebooks (1925–1944)
Max Long
How Britain’s railways prepared for nuclear war
Lucy Slater
Trevor Pinch: a personal and institutional appreciation
Tim Boon
Trevor Pinch’s legacy for media studies
Simone Tosoni
Obituary: John P Ward (29 July 1940–9 April 2023)
Michael Pritchard
Book review:
What Photographs Do: The Making and Remaking of Museum Cultures
Geoffrey Belknap
A history of ourselves?
Tim Boon
Book review:
Science Illustration: A History of Visual Knowledge from the 15th Century to Today
, by Anna Escardó
Surya Bowyer
19
Spring 2023
Issue 19
Editorial: Issue 19
Kate Steiner
The Indian challenge and the rise of Manchester
Prasannan Parthasarathi
When is a shield not a shield? Interpreting Indigenous versatility in an East End match factory
Nicola Froggatt
Supporting young children’s learning from science objects: the importance of play on gallery
Naomi Haywood, Karen Davies and Lauren Souter
‘We lost a type of job for a type of person in this country’: changing expectations of working in the UK scientific civil service
Emmeline Ledgerwood
Collecting twenty-first century science: an analysis of public and professional perceptions
Esme Mahoney-Phillips
From obsolete technology to performance instrument: new live presentations of the EMS Synthi 100
Frances Morgan
Book review:
Curious Devices and Mighty Machines: Exploring Science Museums
by Samuel J M M Alberti (Reaktion Books, 2022)
Alison Hess
18
Autumn 2022
Issue 18
Congruence Engine in action
Helen Graham and Arran J Rees
Origins and ambitions of the Congruence Engine project
Tim Boon
The Congruence Engine Manifesto
Alex Butterworth
History of communications and the Congruence Engine: early thoughts and possibilities
Jon Agar
History of textiles and the Congruence Engine
William Ashworth
The future: reflections on emerging machine-learning methods for digital heritage
Asa Calow
Connecting places and collections
Ben Russell and Wayne Cocroft
Connecting with industrial heritage collections using video production methods
Paul Craddock
Energising connections in museum collections
Graeme Gooday, Kylea Little, Bernard Musesengwe and Cameron Tailford (Deceased)
Collaborative conversation as a method for exploring multiple perspectives on 'community' and forms of knowledge in the Congruence Engine
Simon Popple, Stefania Zardini Lacedelli, Arran J Rees, Stuart Prior and Maggie Smith
Textiles in a modern age
Tim Smith
The potential and pitfalls of machine learning in the Congruence Engine context
John Stack and Jamie Unwin
‘South Kensington is practically as far away as Paris or Munich’: the making of industrial collections in Edinburgh, Newcastle and Birmingham
Kylea Little, Felicity McWilliams and Ellie Swinbank
Working at scale: what do computational methods mean for research using cases, models and collections?
Daniel C S Wilson
The role of digital humanities in an interdisciplinary research project
Jane Winters and Anna-Maria Sichani
Surfacing multiple perspectives on keywords for the Congruence Engine; embracing multiplicity, interdisciplinarity, and mutual learning
Stefania Zardini Lacedelli and Arran J Rees
Review:
Living with Machines
Lauren Ryall-Waite
Obituary: Cameron James Tailford, 10 October 1991 – 3 August 2022
Tim Boon and Graeme Gooday
17
Spring 2022
Issue 17
Editorial
Scott Anthony
Zygalski sheets: Polish codebreaking and the role of reconstruction in the
Top Secret
exhibition at the Science Museum
Elizabeth Bruton, Jeremy McCarthy and Dermot Turing
Smart and sustainable: collecting urban transport and mobility innovation in the 2020s
Meredith Greiling
Staging listening: new methods for engaging audiences with sound in museums
James Mansell, Annie Jamieson and Alexander De Little
The BepiColombo ‘model’: looking beyond the ‘original’
Abigail MacKinnon
Black Arrow R4: the object behind the screen
Doug Millard
Photographic plates and spirit fakes: remembering Harry Price’s investigation of William Hope’s spirit photography at its centenary
Efram Sera-Shriar
Commemorating the past, shaping the future: the jubilee and centenary celebrations of the Stockton and Darlington Railway
Sophie Vohra
Book review:
The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
edited by Marcia Kupfer, Adam S Cohen and J H Chajes, Volume 16 in the
Studies in the Visual Culture of the Middles Ages
(Brepols Publishers: Tunhout, Belgium, 2020)
Sara Stradal
Book review:
Native Americans in British Museums
by Jack Davy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021)
Shelley Saggar
16
Autumn 2021
Issue 16
Editorial
Sally MacDonald
Preserving skills and knowledge in heritage machinery operations
Pippi Carty-Hornsby
A long engagement – railways, data and the information age
Robert Gwynne
The Whitworth: a place for Industry and Art
Imogen Holmes-Roe
Reports and commands: deciphering a health exhibition using the SPEAKING mnemonic
David H Lee
From Renaissance medals to the Jaguar E-Type car bonnet: mechanised production and the making of luxury goods
Charles Ormrod
Seismographs at Eskdalemuir Observatory, 1908–1925: tools for rethinking the origins of international cooperation in seismology
Alexandra Rose
Philanthropy, industry and the city of Manchester: the impact of Sir Joseph Whitworth’s philanthropy on Manchester’s built environment
Abi Wilson
Book review:
Photography Off the Scale: Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image
Surya Bowyer
Book review:
Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections
by Professor Corinne Fowler
Subhadra Das
15
Spring 2021
Issue 15
Editorial
Tim Boon
Science and the City
: Introduction
Alexandra Rose
Science and the City
: Valentine Gottlieb, immigrant engineer of Lambeth: his trade card of c. 1810 unpacked
David Bryden
Science and the City
: The role of women in the science city: London 1650–1800
Jane Desborough and Gloria Clifton
Science and the City
: Spaces and geographies of Metropolitan Science
Rebekah Higgitt, Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin and Noah Moxham
Clinical images, imperial power and Bhau Daji’s secret treatment for leprosy at the Royal College of Physicians Museum
Kristin Hussey and Martha Biggins
Lyon Playfair: chemist and commissioner, 1818–1858
Ian Blatchford
Inventor, devoted daughter, or lover? Uncovering the life and work of Victorian naval engineer Henrietta Vansittart (1833–1883)
Emily Rees Koerner
‘Iron lung’ as metaphor
Farrah Lawrence-Mackey
‘Your body is full of wounds’: references, social contexts and uses of the wounds of Christ in Late Medieval Europe
Johanna Pollick, Emily Poore, Sophie Sexon and Sara Stradal
Book review:
Exploring Emotion, Care, and Enthusiasm in “Unloved” Museum Collections
, edited by Anna Woodham, Rhianedd Smith and Alison Hess, Leeds, ARC Humanities Press, 2020
Jennie Morgan
Obituary: Dame Margaret Weston, DBE, FMA (7 March 1926–12 January 2021)
Colin Ford
14
Autumn 2020
Issue 14
Editorial
Sarah Wade
Contagious Cities
: an international collaborative enquiry
Ken Arnold and Danielle Olsen
Artist interviews – new art for
Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries
Katy Barrett, Eleanor Crook, Marc Quinn and Studio Roso
Curating
Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries
Sarah Bond, Katie Dabin, Stewart Emmens, Selina Hurley and Natasha McEnroe
Rapid Response Collecting and the Irish Abortion Referendum
Brenda Malone
The valuable role of risky histories: exhibiting disability, race and reproduction in medical museums
Manon Parry
Misbehaving Bodies
: exhibiting illness
George Vasey
AIDS memorials from obituaries to artworks – a photo essay
Jörn Wolters
13
Spring 2020
Issue 13
Festschrift:
Ways of curating: introduction to a mini-
festschrift
in honour of Robert Bud
Tim Boon
Festschrift:
At the Boundary between Science and Industrial Practices: Applied Science, Arts, and Technique in France
Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent
Festschrift:
of mice and myths: challenges and opportunities of capturing contemporary science in museums
Alison Boyle
Festschrift:
experimenting with research: Kenneth Mees, Eastman Kodak and the challenges of diversification
Jeffrey Sturchio
Festschrift:
how do we value artefacts in museum research?
Helmuth Trischler
Why the anonymous and everyday objects are important: using the Science Museum’s collections to re-write the history of vision aids
Gemma Almond
Projecting soldiers’ repair: the ‘Great War’ lantern and the Royal Society of Medicine
Jason Bate
A model instrument: the making and the unmaking of a model of the Airy Transit Circle
Daniel Belteki
Wounded
– an exhibition out of time
Stewart Emmens
Curating Ocean Ecology at the Natural History Museum: Miranda Lowe and Richard Sabin in conversation with Pandora Syperek and Sarah Wade
Pandora Syperek, Sarah Wade, Miranda Lowe and Richard Sabin
A museum
by
the people
for
the people? A review of St Fagans National Museum of History’s new galleries
Miriam Dafydd
Review:
Behind the Exhibit: Displaying Science and Technology at the World’s Fairs and Museums in the Twentieth Century
Helen Langwick
Book review:
Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration,
The University of Chicago Press, 2019, by Vanessa Heggie
Nanna Kaalund
Book review:
Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain
, by Richard Noakes
Efram Sera-Shriar
12
Autumn 2019
Issue 12
Technologies of Romance
: introduction
Laura Humphreys and Katy Barrett
Technologies of Romance
: Valentine from a Telegraph Clerk (m) to a Telegraph Clerk (f): the material culture and standards of early electrical telegraphy
Elizabeth Bruton
Technologies of Romance
: on the choice of a typeface for a book and the possibilities for technological Romance
Catherine Dixon
Technologies of Romance
: Mineralogy: a digital account
Lee Mackinnon
Technologies of Romance
: looking for ‘object love’ in three works of video art
Paul O'Kane
An overlooked eighteenth-century scrofula pamphlet: changing forms and changing readers, 1760-1824
Hannah Bower
New mobile experiences of vision and modern subjectivities in Late Victorian Britain
Sara Dominici
Writing sound with a human ear: reconstructing Bell and Blake’s 1874 ear phonautograph
Tom Everett
The museum micro-fellowship
Anna Geurts and Oliver Betts
Mobilising the
Energy in Store
: stored collections, enthusiast experts and the ecology of heritage
Elizabeth Haines and Anna Woodham
Collections development in hindsight: a numerical analysis of the Science and Technology collections of National Museums Scotland since 1855
Tacye Phillipson
Book review:
The Life and Legend of James Watt
by David Phillip Miller
Ben Russell
‘Everything passes, except the past’: reviewing the renovated Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA)
Donata Miller
11
Spring 2019
Issue 11
Editorial
Kate Steiner
Wounded
: ‘They had no fever…’ Ambroise Paré (1510–1590) and his method of gunshot wounds management
Elena Berger and Sergey Glyanstev
Wounded
: ‘A small Scar will be much discerned’: treating facial wounds in early modern Britain
Emily Cock
Wounded
: Healing communal wounds: processions and plague in sixteenth-century Mantua
Marie-Louise Leonard
Mind-Boggling Medical History
: creating a medical history game for nurses
Sarah Chaney and Sally Frampton
A discourse with deep time: the extinct animals of Crystal Palace Park as heritage artefacts
Alison Laurence
From the White Man’s Grave to the White Man’s Home? Experiencing ‘Tropical Africa’ at the 1924–25 British Empire Exhibition
Jules Skotnes-Brown
A history of amulets in ten objects
Annie Thwaite
The provenance and context of the Giustiniani Medicine Chest
Julie Ackroyd
A royal gift? Mrs Strangways Horner’s small silver clock, 1740
Tessa Murdoch and Jonathan Betts
In memoriam: Jeff Hughes, 1965–2018
James Sumner
10
Autumn 2018
Issue 10
Editorial
Anne Locker
The life and material culture of Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854-1923): suffragette, physicist, mathematician and inventor
Elizabeth Bruton
Engineering and the family in business: Blanche Coules Thornycroft, naval architecture and engineering design
Keith Harcourt and Roy Edwards
Uncovering the secrets of
Canadian Pacific
Becky Peacock
Wired-up in white organdie: framing women’s scientific labour at the Burden Neurological Institute
David Saunders
The history of women in engineering on Wikipedia
Alice White
From 2D to 3D: the story of graphene in objects
Sarah Baines
The Panstereomachia, Madame Tussaud’s and the Heraldic Exhibition: the art and science of displaying the medieval past in nineteenth-century London
Barbara Gribling
Ventriloquised voices: the Science Museum and the Hartree Differential Analyser
Tom Ritchie
Tacita Dean: LANDSCAPE, PORTRAIT, STILL LIFE
Katy Barrett
Review:
Science Museums in Transition: Cultures of Display in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America
, edited by Carin Berkowitz and Bernard Lightman, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
Henry A McGhie
09
Spring 2018
Issue 09
Getting to grips with energy: fuel, materiality and daily life
Frank Trentmann
‘As snug as a bug in a rug’: post-war housing, homes and coal fires
Lynda Nead
Refrigerating India
Harold Wilhite
Making Material and Cultural Connections: the fluid meaning of ‘Living Electrically’ in Japan and Canada 1920-1960
Heather Chappells and Hiroki Shin
Visualising electricity demand: use and users of a 3D chart from the 1950s
Alice Cliff and Jenny Rinkinen
Light as material/lighting as practice: urban lighting and energy
Joanne Entwistle and Don Slater
Networks of knowledge and power: working collaboratively on the HoNESt project
Stuart Butler
The language of
Electricity
: Jan Hicks in conversation with Bill Morrison
Bill Morrison and Jan Hicks
Turning energy around: an interactive exhibition experience
Sarah Kellberg and Christina Newinger
Collecting the personal: stories of domestic energy and everyday life at the National Museum of Scotland
Elsa Cox, Katarina Grant and Haileigh Robertson
‘The whole exhibition becomes the stage…’ – a journey through time by children for children as a new approach to peer learning
Sabine Oetzel
Energy/Culture: a reading guide for historical literature
Hiroki Shin
08
Autumn 2017
Issue 08
Editorial
Justin Dillon
Museums
theme – Adventures in Museology: category building over a century, and the context for experiments in reinvigorating the Science Museum at the turn of the twenty-first century
Robert Bud
Museums
theme – Quest for Absolute Zero: A Human Story about Rivalry and Cold
Dirk van Delft
Museums
theme – Science vs technology in a museum’s display: changes in the Vienna Museum of Technology with a focus on permanent and temporary exhibitions and new forms of science education
Peter Donhauser
Museums
theme – making Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine
Martha Fleming
Museums
theme – Beyond the Black Box: reflections on building a history of chemistry museum
Jennifer Landry
Adapting to the emergence of the automobile: a case study of Manchester coachbuilder Joseph Cockshoot and Co. 1896–1939
Joshua Butt
A tale of two telegraphs: Cooke and Wheatstone’s differing visions of electric telegraphy
Jean-Francois Fava-Verde
Prosthetic limbs on display: from maker to user
Sophie Goggins, Tacye Phillipson and Samuel J M M Alberti
Towards a more sonically inclusive museum practice: a new definition of ’the ‘sound object
John Kannenberg
‘Great ease and simplicity of action’: Dr Nelson’s Inhaler and the origins of modern inhalation therapy
Barry Murnane, Darragh Murnane, Mark Sanders and Noel Snell
‘Not one voice speaking to many’: E C Large, wireless, and science fiction fans in the mid-twentieth century
Charlotte Sleigh
‘Organising Sound’: how a research network might help structure an exhibition
Tim Boon, Annie Jamieson, John Kannenberg, Aleks Kolkowski and James Mansell
A symposium on histories of use and tacit skills
Tim Boon, Roger Kneebone, Peter Heering, Klaus Staubermann and Yves Winkin
Review: what should reviews do in an online journal? Towards a New Format
Geoffrey Belknap
Review:
More than colours
(or why some Austrian school children might not want to eat red Gummy Bears anymore)
Toria Forsyth-Moser
07
Spring 2017
Issue 07
Editorial
Jo Quinton-Tulloch
Something in the Air: Dr Carter Moffat’s Ammoniaphone and the Victorian Science of Singing
Melissa Dickson
Rather unspectacular: design choices in National Health Service glasses
Joanne Gooding
‘A Chamber of Noise Horrors’: sound, technology and the museum
James Mansell
The Hugh Davies Collection: live electronic music and self-built electro-acoustic musical instruments, 1967-1975
James Mooney
Acoustics on display: collecting and curating sound at the Science Museum
Jennifer Rich
Philip Carpenter and the convergence of science and entertainment in the early-nineteenth century instrument trade
Phillip Roberts
Moments of danger: photography, institutions and the history of the future
Benedict Burbridge
Location, location: a polemic on photographs and institutional practices
Elizabeth Edwards
Contexts for photography collections at the National Media Museum
Michael Terwey
Review:
The Return of Curiosity
, by Nicholas Thomas
Ken Arnold
Review: Science and Technology galleries at National Museums Scotland
Jane Desborough
06
Autumn 2016
Issue 06
Editorial
Tilly Blyth
Giovanni Canestrini’s models of Leonardo da Vinci’s friction experiments
Ian Hutchings
Understanding storm surges in the North Sea: Ishiguro’s electronic modelling machine
Claire Kennard
Threading through history: the vertical transmission of Davy, Faraday and Tyndall’s lecture demonstration practices
Ceri Pitches
Doping at the Science Museum: the conservation challenge of doped fabric aircraft in the
Flight
gallery
Ben Regel, Jannicke Langfeldt, Louisa Burden and Mary Ryan
Pilgrimages to the museums of the new age: appropriating European industrial museums in New York City (1927-1937)
Jaume Sastre-Juan
Problem/science/society
Jane Gregory
Challenges of conservation: working objects
Elizabeth Pye
Review:
Scholar, courtier, magician: the lost library of John Dee
(Royal College of Physicians, 18 January-29 July 2016)
Glyn Parry
Obituary: Brian Bracegirdle (1933-2015) at the Science Museum
R G W Anderson and Sandra Bicknell
Obituary: Dr Anita McConnell FRGS FRSA FRMetS (1936-2016)
Jane Insley
05
Spring 2016
Issue 05
Editorial
Tim Boon
The ‘co’ in co-production: Museums, community participation and Science and Technology Studies
Helen Graham
Private portraits or suffering on stage: curating clinical photographic collections in the museum context
Mieneke te Hennepe
A statistical campaign: Florence Nightingale and Harriet Martineau’s
England and her Soldiers
Iris Veysey
Thinking things through: reviving museum research
Ken Arnold
Functionless: science museums and the display of 'pure objects'
Jean-Francois Gauvin
Flying Scotsman: modernity, nostalgia and Britain’s ‘cult of the past’
Andrew McLean
Cosmonauts: Birth of an Exhibition
Doug Millard
Review:
The Fate of Anatomical Collections
, edited by Rina Knoeff and Robert Zwijnenberg
Simon Chaplin
04
Autumn 2015
Issue 04
Editorial
Ludmilla Jordanova
Capturing the song of the nightingale
Iain Logie Baird
The Science Museum and the Leonardo da Vinci Quincentenary Exhibition of 1952
Jim Bennett
The birth of a collection in Milan: from the Leonardo Exhibition of 1939 to the opening of the National Museum of Science and Technology in 1953
Claudio Giorgione
A sustainable storage solution for the Science Museum Group
Marta Leskard
The
Cosmonauts
challenge
Ian Blatchford and Natalia Sidlina
Through the lens of a space tourist
Julia Tcharfas
Review:
The thrilling adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: the (mostly) true story of the first computer
, by Sydney Padua
James Sumner
Review: Fairfield Govan: visiting a future heritage space
Alex Hale
03
Spring 2015
Issue 03
Editorial
Jean Franczyk
Museums as brokers of participation: how visitors view the emerging role of European science centres and museums in policy
Andrea Bandelli and Elly A. Konijn
Troublesome telephony: how users and non-users shaped the development of early British exchange telephony
Michael Kay
The Art and Science of Acoustic Recording: Re-enacting Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’s landmark 1913 recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
Aleks Kolkowski, Duncan Miller and Amy Blier-Carruthers
Information age? The challenges of displaying information and communication technologies
Tilly Blyth
Embedding plurality: exploring participatory practice in the development of a new permanent gallery
Katy Bunning, Jen Kavanagh, Kayte McSweeney and Richard Sandell
Old weather: citizen scientists in the 19th and 21st centuries
Sally Shuttleworth
Review:
Cabinet of Curiosities: How disability was kept in a box
Joanne Bartholomew
02
Autumn 2014
Issue 02
Editorial
Kate Steiner
James Short and John Harrison: personal genius and public knowledge
Jim Bennett
Oramics to electronica: investigating lay understandings of the history of technology through a participatory project
Tim Boon, Merel van der Vaart and Katy Price
Curating the collider: using place to engage museum visitors with particle physics
Alison Boyle and Harry Cliff
‘½ vol. not relevant’: The scrapbook of Winifred Penn-Gaskell
Caitlin Doherty
Made real: artifice and accuracy in nineteenth-century scientific illustration
Boris Jardine
Science communication in Latin America: what is going on?
Luisa Massarani
Chronometers, charts, charisma: on histories of longitude
Simon Schaffer
Review:
Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude
Seb Falk
Review:
Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century
, by Omar W Nasim
David Hughes
01
Spring 2014
Issue 01
Editorial
Ian Blatchford
Coming home – Bally’s miniature phrenological specimens
Alice Cliff
Reading, writing, drawing and making in the 18th-century instrument trade
Florence Grant
Responding to stories: The 1876 Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus and the Science Museum
Robert Bud
‘Something simple and striking, if not amusing’ – the Freedom 7 special exhibition at the Science Museum, 1965
Jean-Baptiste Gouyon
Watt’s workshop: craft and philosophy in the Science Museum
Ben Russell
On heroism
Ludmilla Jordanova
Sputnik
and the ‘scientific revolution’ – what happened to social justice?
Justin Dillon
Review: Perfect Mechanics: Instrument Makers at the Royal Society of London in the Eighteenth Century, by Richard Sorrenson
Jim Bennett
Review:
Seven Ages of Science
, BBC Radio 4
Rebekah Higgitt
Obituary: Frank Greenaway
Peter Morris and Robert Bud
Oliver Betts
Research Lead
[email protected]
Dr Oliver Betts is Research Lead at the National Railway Museum, York
Author Articles
By Anna Geurts and Oliver Betts
The museum micro-fellowship
Terms and conditions
Privacy and cookies
Web accessibility
Modern slavery
Sustainability
Science Museum Group
