History and Historiography of Science

Blog Watch: STS Observatory

A quick note to direct attention to Jon Agar’s rapid-fire series on science in 2008-2009 over at UCL’s STS Observatory.  The blog was extremely quiet over the summer, so if you’re not a regular visitor, it’s worth checking back in.  Essentially, Agar (who just took over editing the British Journal for the History of Science, by the way) is testing out material for the end of his new book on Science in the Twentieth Century (see his intro post here).  It’s a useful exercise to see what one might imagine constitutes a snapshot of “science” at a point in time at this point in history.  Early posts focused on headline-grabbers, but the last couple of posts are taking a bit more of a systematic or nuts-and-bolts approach to the subject matter.