web resources

What is going to happen with Nature Precedings? The public launch of the “beta” version last summer was met with a lot of positive expectations. Science bloggers have praised it as an initiative to democratize science and as a contribution to the broader open access movement. But so far the result seems disappointing: only some 500 papers have been submitted, few comments […]

Today The Scientist is presenting the winners of the first Laboratory and Video Web Site Awards. They started with 60 nominations (out of tens or hundreds of thousands of lab web sites on the net), then a select group of judges short-listed ten top sites — and now the winners have been chosen. The result is intriguing! […]

Open access on-line publishing has eventually reached the field of history, philosophy and social studies of science, technology and medicine (HP&SofSTM). It’s the Institute of History & Philosophy of Science & Technology at the University of Toronto that hosts the new free-access on-line journal Spontaneous Generations. First issue is just out. The journal — together with a growing number of open access/on-line […]

It seems like our unique position as the only Danish museum with a blog is coming to an end. The Organisation of Danish Museums has annonced a new blog which encourages museums to blog and digitize their research, communication and collections (they also use our blog as a succesful example, though). This makes me think whether the change in […]

Ever noticed that the URI for this blog is www.corporeality.net/museion? In fact, this is a badly chosen URI. Corporeality means (OED) “the quality or state of being corporeal; bodily form or nature; materiality”. Blogs (and other kinds of websites) are good for writing about and visualising concepts, ideas and things. But they cannot really convey the ‘thingness’ of material things. So, how can material […]

More on transplantation: The release of Google Body — “a search service aiming to index the internal and external anatomy of every living creature on the planet” — has just been announced. The new service is said to include “a fuzzy-logic ‘match my organ’ feature, which helps users get in touch with the nearest, most suitable donor […]

Apropos our own Søren Bak-Jensen‘s article “To share or not to share: institutional exchange of cadaver kidneys in Denmark” (forthcoming in Medical History in January) — there is also a more satirical side to the history of contemporary transplantation, as you can see on this recent Today Now! morning show in The Onion‘s online edition. Sometimes I’m in doubt whether The […]

During the last two months, readers of The Scientist have nominated 60 life science laboratory web sites for the monthly magazine’s ‘Laboratory and Video Web Site Awards’. A group of judges have evaluated the nominated sites according to four criteria (design, usability, content and community) and shortlisted 10 of them. And now it’s the readers’ turn, again — to vote for the […]

In an earlier post I discussed the Silicon Valley web-based genetic information up-start company 23andMe as an example of converging technologies. 23andMe and its public-engagement-with-genetics based business idea is the subject of a long and interesting feature article by Thomas Goetz in today’s Wired Magazine. 23andMe is now offering customers to scan their DNA for just $999 (by SNP genotyping from individual saliva samples […]

Joanna Marchant reminds us (on Digital Heritage) that many museums are busy creating on-line catalogues and other digital access points, but that this is a slow process and that few institutions are utilising the full potential of digitalisation. However, she says, a current research project by Suzanne Keene (formerly Head of Collections at Science Museum, now at UCL),  hints that attention should be turned towards mobilising the […]

It’s not directly history of contemporary medicine — but we could nevertheless learn much from the curation project “Från matematikmaskin till IT” (translation probably not necessary 🙂 initiated in 2004 by the Swedish Computer Association (Dataföreningen i Sverige) together with the Department of History of Technology and Science at The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The project focuses on generating new historical source […]

Before I got my recent job I used to teach history of science to biology, chemistry and philosophy students in a small regional university outside Copenhagen (forget the name, you have probably never heard of it anyway). After graduation many of them (not the philosophers, though) were recruited to the burgeoning Danish pharmaceutical industry, including Lundbeck — […]