Research Projects
Multi-disciplinarity will usually preclude univocality: that is to say, the project wouldn't be a fruitful collaboration of different scholars if everyone spoke with the same voice and approached their subject-matter in the same manner. But a consequence of this is that it can be difficult to explain what the various strands of the project have in common. Comparing any two projects offers little help: all seem at first blush equally remote from one another; spanning broad disciplinary space and historical time.
But, as with the Borges essay, "Kafka and His Precursors," when the projects are arrayed together, a pattern becomes more clear. When we see the projects collected, we can see that what they have in common is the question they answer - "how well do 'facts' travel?" - and that the answers, taken together, begin to sum to a response.
Jon Adams
Science writing and the fact/fiction ratio
Fiction can play a persuasive role in real world arguments – but what is the evidential status of fiction, how is it used as data, and what do fictional cases really tell us? Further questions are quickly spawned: is fiction used more like a thought experiment, a counterfactual, a case study? What evidential role is fiction accorded when it is employed? Jon's part of the project looks both at the role played by fictions, and at how science writers who use fictional devices (narratives, dialogues, characters) to carry their message are met midway by novelists using factual information in their fictions. At some point, the ratio of fact to fiction tips over, and popular science becomes fiction, while fiction becomes popular science.
For more information see the personal profile.
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Albane Forestier
How well did commercial facts travel across the eighteenth-century Atlantic?
Albane's research examines the organization of French and British trade with the West Indies in the eighteenth-century. Interested in understanding how metropolitan merchants could run this successfully, despite long distance and slow communications, this contribution to the project consists in analyzing how firms gained access to reliable commercial information and how cooperation was established between the different agents involved in the trade. Research perspectives concern the packaging of the 'fact,' the routes and networks which made the travelling possible and what strategies were used for an optimal exchange of information. Thinking about this work in terms of how well facts travel is a helpful tool for exploring trading practices and commercial institutions - encouraging us to reflect upon what happens when exchange takes place between two social groups with potentially competing agendas.
For more information see the personal profile.
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Peter Howlett
Agri-technologies and travelling facts
Peter’s work for the ‘facts’ project focuses on two areas both concerned with technological change in Indian agriculture. The first of these looks at the the Indian Green Revolution (GR), which aimed to improve the technological base of agriculture. This offers an interesting (if complex) example of about the nature of evidence and how ‘facts’ travel. The academic study of the GR provides insights into how facts travel between academic disciplines, and how facts travel over time. The second strand of Peter’s research (with Aashish Velkar) looks at extension education in Tamil Nadu. Here, the focus is one how knowledge is transferred from academia to non-academic spheres, and how well do the technical facts travel? To assess these questions Peter and Aashish have studied a particular extension education programme in Tamil Nadu, operated between 2004 and 2007.
For more information, see the personal profile.
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Sabina Leonelli
Making small facts travel in bioinformatics
When science is in the news, it's usually because of a large finding such as "Smoking Causes Cancer." But such "big facts" are hardly the everyday work of scientists. Instead, researchers are mostly concerned with obtaining and interpreting small facts about the world: measurements, data points, observations. Much of scientists' efforts are directed towards finding strategies and tools to disclose their results and share them with their peers - all in order that they might be used as evidence for the "big facts" we hear so much about. The advancement of science depends on how these small facts are made to travel - but despite the crucial importance of circulating small facts across research contexts, the means and consequences of such travel are not well understood.
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Erika Mattila
Life histories of facts in infectious disease studies
How are computational tools utilised in public health research and policy-making processes to produce and apply evidence? Erika's current research on "The Life Histories of Facts" develops the processual, evolving concept of life history in order to understand how our knowledge of infectious disease has changed over time and how computational tools and techniques modify that knowledge. Erika studies three cases: 1) Reformation of vaccination strategies in the UK (case of MMR); 2) Pandemic influenza preparedness planning and 3) Dissemination of 'facts' of transmission dynamics via simulation models (case of Haemophilus influenzae type b bacteria). In particular, I focus on the dissemination of model-based ‘facts’ across different research communities and to national health policies. My main interests are to identify the functional roles of factual claims and show their dependency on the production and utilisation contexts. I also explore how the mathematical representations in epidemiology led to the current increase of modelling methods.
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Julia Mensink
Poverty facts travelling between production and usage domain
What makes someone poor? Academics, authorities, and policy makers employ a variety of poverty measures - all produced in different ways. In tracing the production of poverty measures, Julia's research reveals actors with conflicting interests that play a role in determining what counts as a poverty ‘fact.’ Once produced, these facts travel to the user domain, where a variety of user groups use poverty measures for different purposes. This research investigates how poverty facts travel between producer and user domain, using the analogy of economic goods. That is, similar to commercial products, poverty measures are produced, marketed and distributed and consumers use the products to meet a variety of needs. The case studies provide better understanding of the way the poverty measures play a role in and travel between the production and usage domains.
For more information, see the personal profile.
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Ashley Millar
Assessing the wealth of a nation: China’s political economy in the Republic of Letters
“A fact in itself is nothing. It is valuable only for the idea attached to it, or for the proof which it furnishes.”
(Claude Bernard)
Examining China’s political economy in eighteenth-century Britain and France, Ashley's research explores the relationship between a fact and the idea attached to it. Facts on topics ranging from manufacturing to agriculture, trade policy, general wealth, and economic culture, travelled from their originators in China (largely missionaries and merchants) to scholarly and popular authors in Europe, and were then continuously recycled in varying publications. Each group of actors each had their own purpose and agenda. While it is generally believed that authoritative sources encourage diffusion and discourage questioning of facts, here, the debated authority of the primary sources encouraged scepticism, but had little impact on the diffusion of many of their particular facts. It concludes that a fact in itself is something related to but independent of the idea attached to it.
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Mary Morgan
When Facts Travel Free?
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Edmund Ramsden
Crossing the animal-human boundary: rodent experiments and the urban crisis
How and why are some boundaries more or less permeable to facts from beyond the frontier? And are facts better travellers than other elements of science (such as metaphors or models)? The purpose of this research is not to look at boundary work simply as a process of demarcation, but at the ways in which travelling facts enable conceptual exchanges between natural and social, animal and human.
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Simona Valeriani
Travelling knowledge: building techniques in Europe between the 16th and 18th century
Facts are very often thought of as statements - made in words or numbers. But facts are sometimes better recorded and transmitted in material objects. Does the nature of the vehicle that contains, express, and sometimes constitute the facts influence the way the facts travel and are received? Considering the work of archaeologists, historians, conservators and museum curators, this strand of the project focuses on the way in which material objects carry facts through the centuries. The history of architecture has long been concerned with the diffusion of aesthetic styles - but what about the know-how needed in order to actually build a given design? Concentrating on the transmission of technical knowledge in the field of architecture, this part of the project seeks to address this omission, and in so doing, to contribute to the study of how technological knowledge was accumulated, transmitted and developed.
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Aashish Velkar
Inching towards the metre: science, technology and standard setting in the age of Enlightenment
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Patrick Wallis
Professional, social and ethical responses to epidemics, from plague to SARS
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