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Why should we care about science books
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Lewenstein, Bruce V. |
| Copyright Year | 2007 |
| Abstract | Why should we care about science books? After all, we live in a "new media" world where students, researchers, and the public use the World Wide Web for all their information needs. Cutting edge research appears on "preprint archives" or "open ac cess" online journals, text"books" appear as online sites with interactive presentations and links to p resentation, for creating public discussion and dia logue, and even for archiving current research. In that ki nd of world, what’s the purpose of looking at "old fashioned" books? In fact, I want to argue, books are tremendously im portant in science. They provide structure and substance for scientific communities -both commun ities within scientific practice and communities of scientific interest that extend beyond the professi onal scientific world, communities that encompass various publics and define their interaction with s cience. Science books can be understood as shared social experiences, ones that through their use cre ate a common bond that may or may not be based on the actual content of the text. In some cases, the books may serve multiple communities, crossing boundaries in complex ways. Books serve as social m emories, providing cultural touchpoints that allow communities to express their common norms and inter es s. To explore these issues, I will look at books in se veral categories: books of daily use such as refere nc books, textbooks, those with clear influence on int ellectual culture, and those with clear influence o n broader public culture -what the French call " culture scientifique ," or the place of science and scientific ideas in the cultural matrix. I will look at how sc ientific ideas are presented, conveyed, and used to create intellectual regimes, as well as how they ar used in discourses that both contribute to scienc e's social authority and simultaneously allow the ideas to shift meanings as they get used in different contexts. I am focusing on the United States in the years after World War II, but that distinction is somewhat arbitrary; in the postwar years, science b ooks circulated internationally and many publishers prominent in American science were outposts of Euro pean publishers. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 06 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://jcom.sissa.it/sites/default/files/documents/Jcom0601(2007)C03.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.22323/2.06010303 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
