autobiography

Like biography, autobiography has always been an important genre for science communication — like Francis Crick’s autobiography What Mad Pursuit (1988). A couple of decades ago, only a tiny scientific elite had, in practice, access to present themselves autobiographically in the form of book-length memoirs and interviews in newspaper and magazines. Science communication through self-presentation was thus largely restricted to […]

I think first-person accounts — that is, acccounts about oneself and one’s relation to the world told in ‘I’-form, as opposed to accounts of ‘you’, ‘he/she’ or ‘they’ — are fascinating. Such accounts tell something about the people who produce them and they also reveal much about their authors’ relations to others and the culture and environment they live in. […]

One of the potentially most interesting workshop titles I’ve seen announced so far this year is ‘Biodigital lives: making, consuming and archiving the lives of technoscience’. The meeting — convened by Kate O’Riordan (Sussex) and Adrian Mackenzie (Lancaster) and hosted by the Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen), the Centre for Material Digital Culture and the Centre for Life History and […]

Although I don’t like Twitter, I must admit that it is an interesting ego-document genre. A written trace of daily life — a publicly available diary, easily written, easily forgotten. Which made me think about the memoir genre, which is more difficult to write and less easily forgotten. Gore Vidal defined memoir as a story of “how one remembers […]