Collections and Collecting

John Sime (University of Pennsylvania), "The Illustration of Nature Recast: Jacob Green's Models of North American Trilobites"
 
A Monograph of the Trilobites of North America (1832) is a singular experiment in the history of scientific publishing. Each copy included a set of painted plaster-of-Paris casts of fossils to illustrate the descriptions of new trilobite species. Its author Jacob Green (1790—1841), a naturalist and professor of chemistry collaborated with Joseph Brano the artist who produced the casts. Trilobites of North America was one of the earliest classifications of trilobites, enigmatic fossils at the time that were hoped to be found extant. Today, trilobites are well-known icons of extinction. Many of Green’s trilobite genera and species remain in use and scaffolded future work. Trilobites of North America is also among the earliest examples of the use of plaster in paleontology. Green and Brano experimented with depictions of nature in three dimensions to escape the limitations of drawings on the page. Much scholarship has focused on Henry Augustus Ward’s catalogs of fossil replicas. But, unlike Ward’s, Green and Brano’s work was a reported new scientific discoveries. While the novelty of both the subject matter and method of illustration was recognized by American naturalists, today Trilobites of North America is known to few paleontologists or science historians. In this paper, I develop a historical account of how that came to be.

The first part of the paper is descriptive. I document the casts from Green and Brano’s collaboration that are now in collection at The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. I then reconstruct how Green and Brano assembled their monograph: selecting fossils in collections and making casts of them. I also report on the condition of the original fossils when they could be located, but most are now lost or destroyed. This section reveals that Trilobites of North America was the beginning of a nearly decade long collaboration with more expansive aspirations than first realized.

Next, I develop a picture of the epistemic and aesthetic values and practices that led Green and Brano to produce the Trilobites of North America. Green wrote about the epistemic reason for using casts instead of drawings: to produce more accurate illustrations. Aesthetic values also motivated the use of casts, as stated in Brano’s advertisements. I investigate how the casts reflect these values, comparing them to the fossils and paper illustrations. In addition, I examine what role the casts had in paleontological debates at the time, to see if they were used as intended.

Finally, I explore how the design of Trilobites of North America (text and plaster) gave it different affordances than other kinds of scientific publications (broadly construed) available to Philadelphia naturalists. I argue that this unique combination of affordances along with the increasing specialization of scientific practices led to the sorting of Trilobites of North America into its material components, where the connection between book and casts is often lost. Today, the text sits on the library shelf while the plaster trilobites sit in collection drawers.
 

Anna Majeski (American Philosophical Society), "American Natural History, 1750-1850: Depicting Nature in a Time of Change"
 
This talk presents the American Philosophical Society Library & Museum's upcoming spring 2024 exhibit on American natural history. Focusing on the work of William Bartram (d. 1823), Titian Ramsay Peale (d. 1885), and John James Audubon (d. 1851)--all strengths of the APS collections-- it traces how American naturalists engaged with the natural world in new ways, and in a time of enormous social and environmental change. Bartram, Peale, and Audubon are all key figures in introducing new ways of describing the natural world in both words and images, focusing on living nature in its environmental and ecological context, as opposed to the decontextualized approach of European taxonomists. At the same time, the natural world that they depicted was on the cusp of major environmental change, with contemporaries recording diminishing animal populations and dwindling forests. This show brings these two threads together, and asks how natural science is in dialogue with shifting ethical or social attitudes towards the nonhuman world. Moreover, it underlines both Indigenous and African Americans as both forerunners and major contributors in articulating the the new image of nature.

Pedro Raposo (Martha Hamilton and I. Wistar Morris III Executive Director, Library and Archives, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University) and Paul Callomon (Collections Manager, Malacology, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University), "People, Nature, and the Social Extension of Specimens"
 

Marta Lourenço (Museum of Science and Natural History of the University of Lisbon), "Engaging Storytelling: Reading Artefacts of Science"
 
The material culture of science – artefacts, collections, spaces, specimens – has been increasingly used as primary sources for the history of science, technology and medicine. However, due to tradition, past practices, object perceptions, and contingencies related to collecting, among others, scientific museums are often poorly prepared to document collections and respond to the demands of the "material turn" in history. In this workshop, I will explain why this is so important for contemporary museums – storytelling, diverse narratives about the past, "decolonization," etc. – and propose a simple and practical tool for documenting artefacts (the "Gessner Map"). Participants will be asked to engage with artefacts (despite the workshop being online).
 
Marta C. Lourenço is the present director of the Museum of Science and Natural History of the University of Lisbon (MUHNAC). She has background training in Physics (University of Lisbon), a MA in Museology (Nova, Lisbon) and a PhD in Museology and History of Technology (CNAM, Paris). She is the national coordinator of PRISC (Portuguese Research Infrastructure of Scientific Collections). She teaches Material Culture of Science in the Masters of History and Philosophy of Science (Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon) and is a research member of CIUHCT, the Interuniversity Research Centre for the History of Science and Technology (University of Lisbon).

Ally Fulton (University of California-Davis), “Stenographic Specimens in the Preservation of American Science”

Nuala Caomhanach (New York University), "From Unique to Ubiquitous: The Conflict of Endemism in Conservation Law"

Garrett Dash Nelson (Leventhal Map and Education Center, Boston Public Library) “More or Less in Common: Environmental Justice in the Urban Landscape”

Tad Brown (University of Cambridge), “Peanut Traces: Collecting Arachis from the Telegraph Line in Brazil”
 
"In this paper, I trace the enrolment a specific peanut, Arachis nambyquarae Hoehne, into scientific networks as a method for understanding how Brazil became known as the geographic origin of peanuts. The species was named after an Amerindian group in Matto Grosso as well as the scientist who published its first description. Botanists would later reclassify this peanut as a variety within domesticated Arachis. The taxonomic reversal offers support for the argument that the study of plant diversity includes ideas about human diversity."
 

Brooke Penaloza Patzak, FWF Schrödinger Fellow/ Visiting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania: “Geographic Provinces as a Doctrine and Framework for Scientific Collection and Display, 1860-1900"

Katherine Arnold, London School of Economics: "Interpreting the Collector's Logic: The Pursuit of Desiderata in Early Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa"
 

Andrea Marshall, Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies: "Zines as Nonbinary Objects and Questions of Privilege"

Katherine McLeod, New York University: "What to do about rats in the archive," from her dissertation, "How to Display a Hoatzin: Ecology, Eugenics, and Zoology in the Early 20th Century United States"

Maura C. Flannery, Professor Emerita, St. John's University, NY/Research Associate, A.C. Moore Herbarium, University of South Carolina, Columbia:  "Can Digital Collections Bridge the Gap between the Humanities and Science?"

Jesse Smith, Research Curator at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, on “Instruments, Industries, and Invertebrates: Curating Water in the Public History of Science.” 
 
Jesse will be giving us a brief virtual tour of the new “Downstream” exhibit at the Science History Institute and will talk through the process of its development. Then, we will turn to a broader discussion about the relationship between the history of science, public history, and museum exhibitions. Jesse has included two articles (attached) that offer some background about the collections and exhibitions at the Science History Institute.

Nushelle de Silva, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "Conditioning Art, Air, and Action: Exhibition Conservation in the Art Museum"

Anisha Gupta, American Philosophical Society: "Conservation is not neutral: an anti-colonial framework for collections care"

Nadine Löhr, Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities: "Collecting Arabic Scientific Manuscripts - Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos in Mashhad, Iran"

Alison Laurence, Stanford University: "The Quick and the Dead at La Brea: Affective Encounters with Ice Age Los Angeles"

Lukas Rieppel, Brown University: "Locating the Central Asiatic Expedition: Circulation and Accumulation in Early 20th Century Natural History"

Adrianna Link, American Philosophical Society: "Cultural Diplomacy, Conservation, and Computers: Designing an International Center in the Smithsonian Quadrangle"