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Evelyn Preer was an African American stage and film performer who achieved popularity in late 1920s. Before her untimely death in 1932, at the age of 36, Preer starred in 16 films, most of which we...

International audience; In the 1960s, the growing strategic importance of ocean exploration led the French government to develop greater capacity in marine scientific research, aiming to promote cooperative and diplomatic relations with the leading states in ocean exploration. Devised during Charles de Gaulle's government (1958-1969), the restructuring of French oceanography culminated, in 1967, in the establishment of the state-led Centre National pour l'Exploitation des OcØans (CNEXO). Beyond being intended to control the orientation of marine research at a national level, the CNEXO's mission was to use scientific diplomacy to balance a desire for enhancing international cooperative relations in oceanography with French ambitions to equal the USA's leading capacity to explore the oceans. Its director, the naval officer Yves la Prairie, played a crucial role in articulating scientific, national, and diplomatic interests for France in the oceans.

International audience; In the mid-1990s, as the Internet underwent a major wave of growth and commodification, it also became increasingly politicised. In this article, we analyse the process that led to the birth of the digital rights movement in France. Based on archival work and interviews with key protagonists of the movement, this article blends historical, sociological and policy analysis to help explain the politicisation of French “Internet pioneers”. It documents the emergence of alternative Internet service providers, their relationship to other activist groups, and to the wider digital economy. It then shows how the same small group of individuals turned to political advocacy by surveying some of their interactions with policy-makers, focusing in particular on the debate on intermediary liability and freedom of expression. We stress that the particular social trajectories of these digital rights activists confronted with the commodification of the Internet and the power practices of the state converged to create a “perfect storm” that led them to wield exceptional influence on Internet policy in this early phase of development. We also highlight some of the movement’s internal contradictions and explain its waning influence from the early 2000s on. Through this article, we hope to help diversify the historiography of digital activism as well as to contribute to comparative-historical approaches.

A “Sleeping Beauty” (SB) in science is a metaphor for a scholarly publication that remains relatively unnoticed by the related communities for a long time; - the publication is “sleeping”. However, suddenly due to the appearance of some phenomenon, such a “forgotten” publication may become a center of scientific attention; - the SB is “awakened”. Currently, there are specific scientific areas for which sleeping beauties (SBs) are awakened. For example, as the world is experiencing the COVID-19 global pandemic (triggered by SARS-CoV-2), publications on coronaviruses appear to be awakened. Thus, one can raise questions of scientific interest: are these publications coronavirus related SBs? Moreover, while much literature exists on other coronaviruses, there seems to be no comprehensive investigation on COVID-19, - in particular in the context of SBs. Nowadays, such SB papers can be even used for sustaining literature reviews and/or scientific claims about COVID-19. In our study, in order to pinpoint pertinent SBs, we use the “beauty score” (B-score) measure. The Activity Index (AI) and the Relative Specialization Index (RSI) are also calculated to compare countries where such SBs appear. Results show that most of these SBs were published previously to the present epidemic time (triggered by SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV-1), and are awakened in 2020. Besides outlining the most important SBs, we show from what countries and institutions they originate, and the most prolific author(s) of such SBs. The citation trend of SBs that have the highest B-score is also discussed.

Philosophical discussions of disagreement typically focus on cases in which the disagreeing agents are aware that they are disagreeing and can pinpoint the proposition that they are disagreeing about. Scientific disagreements are not, in general, like this. Here we consider several case studies of disagreements that do not concern first-order factual claims about the scientific domain in question, but rather boil down to disputes regarding methodology. In such cases, it is often difficult to identify the point of contention in the dispute. Philosophers of science have a useful role to play in pinpointing the source of such disagreements, but must resist the temptation to trace scientific debates to disputes over higher-level philosophical accounts.

AbstractTravelling is an activity closely associated with Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) and his circle of students. This article discusses the transformative role of studying nature outdoors (turning novices into naturalists) in eighteenth-century Sweden, using the little-known journeys of Carl Bäck (1760–1776), Sven Anders Hedin (1750–1821) and Johan Lindwall (1743–1796) as examples. On these journeys, through different parts of Sweden in the 1770s, the outdoors was used, simultaneously, as both a classroom and a space for exploration. The article argues that this multifunctional use of the landscape (common within the Linnaean tradition) encouraged a democratization of the consumption of scientific knowledge and also, to some degree, of its production. More generally, the study also addresses issues of how and why science and scientists travel by discussing how botanical knowledge was reproduced and extended ‘on the move’, and what got senior and junior students moving.

Intermarriage was a key site for testing politics of difference within the multicultural German Empire. Across the German states in the mid-nineteenth century, marriage between members of different religions frequently proved impossible. Until various civil marriage laws were introduced between the 1840s and 1870s, marriage remained within the remit of the church. As a consequence, marrying across confessional lines was rarely permitted. The implications were clear: marriage was seen as the embodiment of one’s culture – defined primarily in confessional (alongside socio-economic) terms, and it was also viewed as a key transmitter of culture by producing new generations of faithful observers of particular denominations. As a country divided between three confessions, religion in mid- to late nineteenth-century Germany proved an important aspect of difference within the new German nation state. By the end of the nineteenth century, following the introduction of civil marriage, mass waves of migration, the growth of urbanization and the expansion of the German overseas empire, the connotation of ‘mixed marriage’ in Germany appeared to have shifted. It remained a code for crossing confessional lines, but its resonance had changed. By the late nineteenth century, ‘mixed marriage’ had come to characterize another kind of cultural mixing as well: that between races, both at home within Germany and abroad within its colonies and diasporic outposts. And, between 1905 and 1912, ‘mixed marriage’ between Germans and ‘natives’ had been banned in German Southwest Africa, East Africa and Samoa. Why and how was intermarriage a flashpoint in debates on German identity politics at the turn of the twentieth century? As this article shows, intermarriage in the German Empire mattered to families, broader communities, and legislators because it was a pivotal means through which social groups formed, interacted and maintained boundaries at a time when visions of Germany were expanding.

This paper describes a working example of semantically modelling cultural heritage information and data from the National Gallery collection in London. The paper discusses the process of semantically representing and enriching the available cultural heritage data, and reveals the challenges of semantically expressing interrelations and groupings among the physical items, the venue and the available digital resources. The paper also highlights the challenges in the creation of the conceptual model of the National Gallery as a Venue, which aims to i) describe and understand the correlation between the parts of a building and the whole and iii) to be able to record the accurate location of objects within space and capture their provenance in terms of changes of location. The outcome of this research is the CrossCult venue ontology, a fully International Committee for Documentation Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM) compliant structure developed in the context of the CrossCult project. The proposed ontology attempts to model the spatial arrangements of the different types of cultural heritage venues considered in the project: from small museums to open air archaeological sites and whole cities. ii) to record and express the semantic relationships among the building components with the building as a whole

The new field of the history of knowledge is often presented as a mere expansion of the history of science. We argue that it has a greater ambition. The re-definition of the historiographical domain of the history of knowledge urges us to ask new questions about the boundaries, hierarchies, and mutual constitution of different types of knowledge as well as the role and assessment of failure and ignorance in making knowledge. These issues have pertinence in the current climate where expertise is increasingly questioned and authority seems to lose its ground. Illustrated with examples from recent historiography of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, we indicate some fruitful new avenues for research in the history of knowledge. Taken together, we hope that they will show that the history of knowledge could build the expertise required by the challenges of twenty-first century knowledge societies, just like the history of science, throughout its development as a discipline in the twentieth century, responded to the demands posed by science and society.

This study has a two-fold structure, in its first part exploring various models of experimental literature, proposed by researchers such as Gerald Prince and Warren Motte, as well as theoretical attempts to define and analyze experimental literature in Romania. The second part focuses on the quantitative analysis of keywords related to “the experimental” found in literary histories of Romanian literature authored by E. Lovinescu, G. Călinescu, Nicolae Manolescu, and Mihai Iovănel, as well as The General Dictionary of Romanian Literature and The Chronological Dictionary of the Romanian Novel. By simply searching several pointedly chosen terms in the corpus, a cartography of what is considered to be experimental emerges clearly, alongside its relation to the canon, to the dynamics of literary genres, and to the temporal evolution of Romanian literature.