history of technology

Steven Lubar — director of the public humanities programme at Brown University and keen observer of things museological — has just drawn his Twitter followers’ attention to a “nice” blog post on the problems of collecting contemporary artefacts written by National Museum of American History curator Carlene Stephens. Stephens’ blog post revolves around Stanley (a driver-less vehicle that won a historic […]

Yesterday, David Pantalony from University of Ottawa and the Canada Science and Technology Museum gave a talk in Medical Museion’s MUSE seminar series titled ‘Examine first, ask what it is later: The multiple interpretations of 20th century scientific artifacts’. David’s presentation gave rise to an intense discussion and an interesting stream of twitter-comments that are eternalised on Storify […]

Last year, Medical Museion received the Society for the History of Technology’s (SHOT) Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits — an award that recognises museums and exhibits that interpret the history of technology, industry and engineering to the general public. I am proud to serve on the Dibner Award committee for 2012-2014 — and we are now […]

Readers of this blog may remember that the 2010 biannual European medical museum conference was organised here at Medical Museion. The next biannual meeting, in 2012, will be hosted by our German sister museum, the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, 13-15 September. The theme for the Berlin meeting is ‘Hidden Stories: What do medical objects […]

I first got hooked on using Twitter in- and outside conference rooms when I attended last year’s Artefacts meeting at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden. Hopefully the award-winning and refurbished National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh also has an acceptable wifi connection when hosting this year’s meeting, 7-9 October. This year’s meeting is thematically focused on scientific and technological museum artefacts against the backdrop of the notion […]

Roland Wittje participated in the Medical Museion MUSE seminar with a paper born out of his annoyance at an observed change in the role of the curator. He described winds of change in the museum world. A change away from the traditional curator with close and specific knowledge of the objects and collections in their […]

A couple of days ago, historian of science Rebekah Higgitt (curator at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and author of a very good book about 19C Newton-biographers), myself and some other historians of science had a Twitter discussion about whether there is progress in science, and, if so, what we might mean by it. Now, […]

We are proud to invite to the first seminar in our new MUSE seminar series: Roland Wittje, University of Regensburg From Material Culture to Material Heritage: History of Contemporary Science Beyond the Linguistic Turn Auditorium, Medical Museion, Bredgade 62, DK-1260 Copenhagen K Thursday 26 January, 3-4.40 pm Abstract: Getting our hands dirty in the messy […]

I just love this series of images from the Russian Polytechnical Museum in Moscow. The photographer, Mae Ryan, was primarily fascinated with the female custodians. But more fascinating, in my mind, are the galleries themselves — the huge rooms, the postwar bleak pastel colours, the curtains (yes, the curtains!), the refusal to translate into English, the […]

It’s easy to become so enthusiastic about the power of web-based media for science communication that one sometimes forgets that science could actually, in some mysterious ways, be communicated even in the age before World Wide Web, blogs and Twitter. Overly enthusiasm calls for historical reflection — which is exactly what the organisers of the second annual Anglo-French Conference on Scientific Communication and its […]