web resources

For some reason I have until recently been unaware of rete, a mailing list for curators, historians, students, collectors, dealers, etc, interested in the history of scientific instruments. The archives (from June 2003 onwards) are available online. The list owner (the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford) will not accept messages for commercial purposes like announcing instruments […]

Wayne Clough, the new head of the Smithsonian Institution, wants to change the venerable museum institution: “We need to make our collections, talented scholars and other resources accessible worldwide by providing additional platforms and vehicles for educating and inspiring large audiences,” he said to yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, and added: Our job is to authenticate and inform […]

I’ve always been skeptical of claims to revolutions in science and technology. Thomas Kuhn actually made a great disservice to historical awareness among scientists and to science communication with his 1962 bestseller The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Every now and then a new finding is described as a ‘revolution’ in science, technology or medicine — despite the fact […]

One of my longheld convictions is that the individual life trajectory is both one of the most neglected and most exciting aspects of biomedicine, not least when it comes to collecting and displaying biomedicine in museum exhibitions. Documents, images and objects from individual scientists, doctors, engineers and patients is a rich resource for museum curators — the individual and personal perspective […]

Seems like museum 2.0 has already come of age. Because the Smithsonian Institution has just hosted a two-day conference titled “Smithsonian 2.0: A Gathering to Re-Imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age”. A stellar group of keynote speakers and experts from the web and digital worlds met with a group of Smithsonian staff on 23-24 January to take a closer look at the […]

Wow! Click on this museum visitor feedback video system software, developed by the Dutch web service company Skipintro (used here for visitors to Amsterdam Rijksmuseum‘s hyped Damien Hirst diamond skull show). Wonder what it costs? Nina is right: it’s not ‘museum 2.0’. But it’s a pretty nice visitor feedback system. This particular design (human faces circling around Hirst’s diamond skull) makes it […]

I’ve just found out about search-cube, the search engine that displays the results as a cube of screen shots that you spin and rotate and enlarge for preview before you visit them (it’s powered by Google and based on Thumbshots). Here’s the final result of a search for “Medical Museion” on search-cube. The static search-result image is great in itself […]

I cannot really see the point in Corey Menscher’s much applauded (for example, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) gadget Kickbee. In short, Kickbee is a wearable belly belt with embedded piezo sensors, which send a message to a Twitter account each time the foetus kicks around. Writes Corey: “With the Kickbee, I wanted to create a device that […]

Assume you have submitted a paper for the Bulletin of the History of Medicine or Museums & Society or some other fine humanities journal. Then imagine the editors write back to you saying that the anonymous reviewers just loved it and that the journal will accept it for publication in a forthcoming issue — on the condition that you also submit a Wikipedia page that […]

Just a note about the new YouTube channel, which showcases videos created for the British Medical Journal (BMJ), one of the most influential and widely read general medical journals in the world. The channel is only three weeks old and the number of videos isn’t overwhelming yet (some interviews, mainly with leading experts on public health issues, like health equity and antibiotic resistance). But […]