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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.

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.

The psychoanalytical case history was in many ways the pivot point of John Forrester’s reflections on case-based reasoning. Yet the Freudian case is not without its own textual forebears. This article closely analyses texts from two earlier case-writing traditions in order to elucidate some of the negotiations by which the case history as a textual form came to articulate the mode of reasoning that we now call ‘thinking in cases’. It reads Eugène Azam’s 1876 observation of Félida X and her ‘double personality’—the case that brought both Azam and Félida to prominence in late 19th-century French science—against a medico-surgical case penned by the Bordeaux physician in the same decade. While the stylistics of Azam’s medical case mirror its epistemic underpinnings in the ‘vertical’ logics of positivist science, the multiple narratives interwoven in Félida’s case grant both Azam and his patient the role of knowledge-making actors in the text. This narrative transformation chimes with the way Azam reasons ‘horizontally’ from particulars to Félida’s singular condition, but sits in tension with his choice to structure the observation along a ‘vertical’ axis. Between the two, we glimpse the emergence of the psychological observation as a mode of writing and thus of thinking in cases.

Many profess faith in the universal rule of deterministic law. I urge remaining agnostic, putting into nature only what we need to account for what we know to be the case: order where, and to the extent that, we see it. Powers and mechanisms can do that job. Embracing contingency and deriving order from powers and mechanisms reduces three kinds of problems: ontological, theological, and epistemological. Ontologically, there is no puzzle about why models from various branches of natural and social science, daily life, and engineering serve us in good stead if all that's happening is physics laws playing themselves out. Also, when universal laws are replaced with a power/mechanism ontology, nothing is set irredeemably by the Big Bang or at some hyper-surface in space-time. What happens can depend on how we arrange things to exploit the powers of their parts. That may be put to significant theological advantage. The epistemological problem comes from philosopher of physics, Erhard Scheibe. Given what we take physics to teach about the universality of interaction, there is just one very large object - the entire universe - to be governed by laws of nature. How then do we ever learn those laws?

By the late-1950s, the Soviet Union acquired a strong position as a world oil exporter, thanks to major discoveries in the Ural-Volga area. The new availability prompted the USSR to greatly increase its exports, especially to West European countries. Such strategy was met with ambivalent reactions, depending on each countryʼs position and status on the world oil scene, as well as on their political and economic needs. In order to transport their oil to strategic areas within the Soviet Union and to Europe, the Soviets devised a project for a colossal pipeline system. This plan caused anxiety at NATO since Russian oil could be wielded as a weapon to weaken the West both militarily and economically. Beside being seen as potentially threatening for the interest of Anglo-American and French oil majors, the considerable amount of cheap oil the pipeline system would carry generated worries about Western Europe becoming dependent on the USSR for its energy. In order to complete the system, however, the Soviets needed considerable amounts of large-diameter steel pipes and equipment, which they had to import from the West. Thus in 1961 the US delegation at NATO proposed a comprehensive embargo of large-diameter pipes in order to delay the systemʼs construction. The proposal met with strong British opposition and a lukewarm attitude by a number of NATO members, and the debate soon came to revolve around 1) the definition of steel pipes as strategic items, and 2) whether a security rationale should be prioritized over an economic one when dealing with the Soviets. In this paper, I argue that the definition of what oil pipes are as technological artifacts, as well as their ultimate content, was ultimately shaped by the NATO debate on the US proposition. What an oil pipe was – or was not – and how it could be used, derived from the struggle to control or suppress commerce with the Soviet Union.

AbstractThe Edward Snowden leaks challenge policy makers and the public's understanding and perspectives on the role of security intelligence in liberal democratic states. This article explores the challenges confronting security intelligence collection by the ‘Five Eyes’ countries – particularly those most affected by the leaks. We argue that the debate now needs to move beyond simplistic notions of privacy vs. security to a more detailed understanding of the policy and ethical dilemmas confronting policy makers and intelligence agencies. To that end, we provide a schematic framework (methods, context and target) to promote a better understanding of the practical, policy and ethical problems for security intelligence collection emerging post Snowden. The framework is a first step in identifying common principles that could be used develop an ethically informed set of policy guidelines to help decision makers better navigate between citizen's two basic rights: security and privacy.