Learning by the Book: Manuals in the History of Knowledge Conference

German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. and Princeton University (the Center for Collaborative History, the International Fund, and the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project in the Humanities Council)

Wednesday, June 6, 2018 4:00 pm EDT to Sunday, June 10, 2018 2:00 pm EDT

Princeton University
Princeton, NJ

Often overlooked, handbooks, protocols, and manuals are key tools in the making, preserving, and sharing of knowledge. Across editorial offices, artisanal workshops, religious schools, culinary institutes, and biomedical laboratories, instructional and reference texts codify the knowledge of a working community, with an eye to communicating what a new practitioner needs to know. This conference will address how handbooks, protocols, manuals, catalogues and related instructional or reference media have contributed to the standardization, codification, transmission, and revision of knowledge in diverse fields. How are practices and protocols written down, distributed or preserved, and how are objects or processes named, registered or classified? What kind of credit accompanies the development or compilation of methods or reference literature? When and why do certain books become commercially successful or canonical, and others obsolete? How does their circulation relate to the commodification of required materials, or to more informal forms of exchange?This conference will feature presentations from more than 30 speakers and discuss manuals and handbooks from antiquity to the present and in a broad geographical and topical scope.

Conference conveners: Angela Creager (Princeton University), Mathias Grote (Humboldt University Berlin), Elaine Leong (MPI for the History of Science, Berlin), and Kerstin von der Krone (GHI Washington)

View the full schedule here.

Registration: Registration is required for this conference. For those planning to attend the conference in person, priority will be given to Princeton University graduate students and faculty. There is a remote participation option as well, which is limited to 100 individuals. For all registration types, click here.