Comic · de Gruyter Oldenbourg

Digital Archives of Science

Revisiting the Vestiges of Knowledge-Making

The archive of science is a place where scientific practices are sedimented in the form of drafts, protocols of rejected hypotheses and failed experiments, obsolete instruments and other vestiges. As science goes increasingly digital, so does its archive, opening up new ways of understanding the making of scientific knowledge for historians. Digital collections clearly differ from the traditional lieux de mémoire. What they store are not tangible and authentic objects, but data to be processed by computer algorithms. How do these digital infrastructures shape our encounter with the scientific past? What insights can we gain from the vestiges of science as they turn into data? Positioned at the intersection of Science Studies, Media Studies, and Digital Humanities, this book critically examines digital archives of science as (new) infrastructures for the representation and production of memory and knowledge. Drawing on a large corpus of scientific collections across disciplines and combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, it explores the boundaries and possibilities that digital archives introduce for the history of science and technology.