web resources

An unease with the current scientific publishing system was addressed in two open panels at last year’s EASST conference. Now, a new journal has been launched in order to tackle some of the issues discussed at EASST 2006. The Open peer review process of the International Journal of Feminist Technoscience (IJFT) makes use of “an interactive framework to secure quality, relevance, efficiency and democracy in […]

I just discovered a description of Sev Fowles’s “Thing Theory” spring 2007 seminar at Dept of Archaeology, Columbia University. It has an excellent reading list and a clever way of structuring the whole course through the themes of psychologised, sacred, socialised, fetishised, subjectivised and technologised objects. A very inspiring syllabus for a new version (?) of the “Towards a […]

The recently announced marriage between Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki is not just an innocent piece of celebrity news (the circumstances of the Bahamas beach wedding last week are perfectly romantic though :-). It also signifies one of the basic tendencies in contemporary technoscience, viz. the web-based convergence between postgenomics and information technology. Sergey Brin doesn’t need much of an introduction. But Anne […]

In two earlier posts I discussed two excellent mock biomedical/biotech websites — Justine Cooper’s Big Pharma-look-alike Havidol site and Adam Brandejs’s Genpet site, but otherwise I haven’t found anything worthwhile. (Browsing around I found an apparently quite famous porn site mockery –the horny manatee site — created by an NBC team after Conan O’Brian had invented the idea in a November 2006 […]

MedWorm! What a nice surprise discovery! MedWorm is a RSS feed provider which daily collects updates from (at the moment) over 3500 4000 medical data sources (medical blogs and web sites, medical journals).   You can then subscribe (e.g., by using Google Reader) to its outgoing RSS feeds which are conveniently diveded into a number of medical categories (see here for […]

The Google Books project is perhaps not that relevant for our field because we almost only refer to recent (and thus copyrighted) books which are only available in truncated form. But otherwise the project is potentially fantastic. Imagine having all books online that have published in the 500 years from the dawn of printing to the […]

Steve Fuller at the University of Warwick (and sometime visitor to Copenhagen) is inviting everyone to participate in a cyberconference on the ‘emerging/converging technologies’ research agenda, i.e., the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science into a common interdisciplinary framework for the alleged betterment of the human condition. The cyberconference — which is sponsored by the […]

National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) History of Medicine Division has launched a new web exhibit called “Diseases of the Mind: Highlights of American Psychiatry Through 1900”. It covers the 18th and 19th centuries only and thus falls outside the period limit of his blog, but since web exhibits are always interesting to learn from I thought I would mention it anyway. […]

Science Museum already has two educational websites: www.ingenious.org.uk and www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk. Now (as announced last Tuesday) they are going to build a new multimedia website based on their medical history collections aimed at high school and undergrad student (and the general public, of course). The goal is to place images (supplemented by a series of interactive tools) of around 4,000 “interesting, sometimes beautiful but also […]

We installed Google Analytics tracking code last Sunday to follow the traffic on this blog. Here the “executive overview” of the last four days (~100 visits and ~250 pageviews): Most visitors are from Europe and Eastern US — but there are also IP-numbers from Madras, India; Muscat, Oman; and Federal, Argentina. 35% of the visits are returnings, but only 11% are in-house. 56% […]

The New Media department of the Science Museum started a blog called “Science Museum Dev” (short for development, I guess) last July to spread news “about some of the work we do, developing websites and interactive exhibits for one of the most famous museums in the world”. Unfortunately they haven’t updated it since November — please […]

Jim Spadaccini, director of Ideum, has created a special search engine (a Google Co-op) for museum blogs. Try it here.