Meetings

Monthly HSTM Working Group

The Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine hosts a History of Ocean Science, Technology, and Medicine working group. This group can be accessed here and meets every third Tuesday at 2pm (EDT).

Upcoming Ocean HSTM Meetings:

Jack Bouchard, Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Two chapters from his manuscript Terra Nova: Work, Water and Food in an Early Atlantic World

Tuesday, September 20, 2022 2:00 pm to 3:30 pm EDT

PAST MEETINGS

2022

HSTM Oceans Working group:

Jakobina K. Arch (Whitman College), “Mitigating Risk: Cultural and Economic Adaptations to Oceanic Dangers in Tokugawa Japan” (Tuesday 17, 2022)

Madgalena Grüner (Universität Hamburg), “Else Bostelmann’s Abyssal Visions and the Ocean-Surreal” (January 18, 2022)

Beatriz Martínez-Rius (Sorbonne Université) “International science, salt domes, and oil: deep-sea drilling in the Mediterranean” (Feburary 15, 2022)

Alison Glassie (Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University), “Ninety Perfect Sealskins: Toni Morrison’s Counter-history of Sealing” (March 15, 2022)

Katherine Sinclair (Rutgers University), ” ‘A Magnificent Natural Zoo’: Domesticating the French Kerguelen Islands” (April 19, 2022)

2021

During the 26th International Congress of History of Science and Technology, ICHO sponsored six panels, with 24 presentations around the History of the Oceans. Details on the panels and talks can be found here.

HSTM Oceans Working group:

Emily Hutcheson (University of Wisconsin-Madison): Seeing Ecologies of the Deep and Shallow Seas: Local Labor and Knowledge in the Malay Archipelago, 1899-1900 (Tuesday, November 16, 2021)

Instituting Biology in the Great Lakes: Scientific Survey Work and Inland Seas Maritime Culture, 1893-1903. Judy Johns Schloegel (independent Scholar)

2013

Meeting Minutes of the December 2013 Council Meeting of the Division of History of Science, Technology and Medicine can be accessed here.

ICHO has sponsored the following panel at the International Congress on the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, held in July 2013 in Manchester, UK.

S108. Knowledge at work in the oceans of the world

Sponsoring bodies

DHST Oceanography Commission

DHST Pacific Circle Commission

Symposium organisers:
Walter LENZ | Institute of Oceanography, Germany
Vera SCHWACH | Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education, Norway

Mon 22 July, late morning until late afternoon

S108-A. Observers and instruments

Mon 22 July, late morning

Chair: Walter LENZ | Institute of Oceanography, Germany

Commentary: Roy MACLEOD | University of Sydney, Australia

Jakov DULCIC | Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries, Croatia

Marine science and Croatian naturalists, from the sixteenth century to modern-day collaborations

Loïc PÉTON | Université de Bretagne Occidentale, France

Georges Aimé (1810-1846), an observer of the Mediterranean Sea

Vera SCHWACH | Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education, Norway

At sea with science, at work with water samplers: the importance of instruments in oceanography, 1890-1920

Artur SVANSSON | University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Oceanographic instruments: Walfrid Ekman’s repeating current meter and its use at deep-sea, 1930

S108-B. Expeditions

Mon 22 July, early afternoon

Chair: Vera SCHWACH | Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education, Norway

Johan VAN BENNEKOM | Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Netherlands

The science of the oceans at work on the oceans

Cornelia LÜDECKE | University of Hamburg, Germany
Colin SUMMERHAYES | Scott Polar Research Institute, United Kingdom

German echo-soundings of the south Atlantic seabed, 1938-39

Hauke BIETZ | Independent scholar, Germany

The Danish deep-sea expedition of the Galathea II, 1950-1952: results and epistemological traces

Marcel WERNAND | Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Netherlands
Hans VAN DER WOERD | Free University Amsterdam, Netherlands
Winfried GIESKES | University of Groningen, Netherlands

Globe-wide response of ocean colour to climate change over the last twelve decades

S108-C. On the interpretation of in-situ data

Mon 22 July, late afternoon

Chair: Cornelia LÜDECKE | University of Hamburg, Germany

Erik DÜCKER | Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands

The pioneering investigations of Paul Regnard (1850-1927) into the physiological demands on organisms in the deep sea

Natascha ADAMOWSKY | University of Freiburg, Germany

Visualising the uncertain: William Beebe’s A Half Mile Down. Epistemological-aesthetical thoughts on the construction of a submarine space of knowledge using the example of deep sea exploration

Walter LENZ | Institute of Oceanography, Germany
Guenther RADACH | (not listed), Germany

On the understanding of plankton blooms in the North Sea: from single-net catches to 3D-dynanical computer simulations

Commentary: Roy MACLEOD | University of Sydney, Australia

Symposium abstract

When historians turn seaward the view include not only the coastline, but also the ocean which for a large part is not discernible by men directly. Thus ships, machines, gears, tools, instruments and skills have been critical for the attempts to understand the conception of the sea. Science was – and is- of critical significance as a way of knowing the sea, and the technologies used by scientist mediated crucial knowledge about the ocean. The contributers to the Symposium will through their cases-studies examine the importance of some of the tools and the methods used in the field studies on the ocean, in order to deepen the overall understanding of scientific practice and scientists at work.