Workshop - Temporalities in Scientific Narratives

Does Time Always Pass? Temporalities in Scientific Narratives
May 30-31 2019 LSE/Royal Institution, London

Workshop organised as a collaboration between the Narrative Science Project and The Royal Institution.

Venue: The Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS. We anticipate starting at 10:00 (with coffee available from 09.30) on the 30th and ending by 17.30 on the 31st. Organised by Prof. Mary S. Morgan and Dr. Andrew Hopkins

The standard view of narrative is inextricably bound up with the passage of time. Narrative scholars are convinced that time is an essential element in any narrative, and it has been thought equally essential, though treated in different ways, by philosophers of history. But exactly how to think about time in the narratives of science is not self-evident. And if we look at how scientists use time in narratives, we see a number of different ways in which it is taken into account and is deployed. In this workshop, the focus will be on the different temporalities in narratives as they occur in scientific discourses. The obvious loci for such explorations are what are generally referred to as the historical sciences, that is, those that seek to reconstruct the past on the basis of what can be observed in the present. However, time and its narrative expression are to be found in a wide variety of places, some of which will be explored by the speakers at the workshop. Throughout the workshop, the question of how essential time is to narrative will remain open for argument.

We are grateful to the financial contributions and contributions in kind from the European Research Council and the Royal Institution. If you would like to express interest in attending please contact Dr Dominic Berry. The number of places is unfortunately limited, so please make sure to write to us sooner rather than later. The deadline for expression of interest is Friday May 17. We will notify those we are able to accommodate shortly thereafter.

Speakers and titles:

• Norton Wise (UCLA) - Faraday's lines of force and the temporality of serial narration 
• John Beatty (UBC, Vancouver) - When you can't get there from here: The importance of temporal order in evolutionary biology and ecology 
• Dorothea Debus (Universität Konstanz) - Memory, imagination and narrative 
• Paula Olmos (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) - Narratives in scientific argument and explanation 
• Rosa Hardt (OPEN Scotland) - Narrative Understanding: Parts, Wholes, and Recombinable Systems 
• William Matthews (LSE, London) - Time and ethnographic generalisation in anthropology: an example from Chinese divination 
•  John Huss (University of Akron, Ohio) - Mass extinction, narrative closure, and evidence 
• Teru Miyake (NTU, Singapore) - Temporal detail and evidence in seismic source reconstruction 
• Anne Teather (University of Manchester) - Stored and storied time in the Neolithic 
• Elspeth Jajdelska (University of Strathclyde) - Do we always need a timeline? The roles of temporal sequence in art narratives and science narratives 
• Thomas Bonnin (University of Exeter) - Explaining the origin of eukaryotic cells between narratives and mechanisms 
• Tirthankar Roy (LSE, London) - Technological change in the Indian textile industry (title TBC) 
• Daniel Pargman (KTH, Stockholm) - Using allohistorical narratives to envision alternative energy futures 
• Andrew Hopkins (LSE, London) - Alfred Wegener's arguments for continental drift: A consillience of narrative explanations

PhD travel bursaries

To increase participation from the postgraduate community, we are making available 4 travel bursaries, each of a maximum of £250. These can be used to recover the cost of train or airfare for those who wish to attend, and who are currently enrolled on a PhD programme, preferably with research interests directly related to the workshop agenda. To apply for a PhD travel bursary please write to Dr Dominic Berry. Please include: * Your name * University Affiliation * PhD Programme and thesis title * And no more than 100 words on how this workshop relates to your research. The deadline for applications to the travel bursary is Monday May 13. You will be notified as to the outcome of your application shortly thereafter. Applicants will be selected to ensure a diverse range of research interests and institutions are represented.

Public seminar series - Narrative Science - Apr-Jun 2019 - London

If you would like to be reminded of these seminars in advance, or would like to keep up-to-date with the Narrative Science project (including our upcoming workshops, working papers and publications) please join our mailing list via www.narrative-science.org

30/4/2019

• Neil Tarrant - The Roman Index and Arnald of Villanova: The Rejection of Albert the Great’s Astrology
• Heike Hartung - Longevity Narratives: From Life Span Optimism to Statistical Panic

14/5/2019

• Sally Horrocks and Paul Merchant - Scientists’ narratives in An Oral History of British Science
• Sarah Dillon - “The Ineradicable Eliza Effect and Its Dangers”: Weizenbaum, Pygmalion and the Implications of Gendering AI 

28/5/2019

• Emily Hayes - Fashioned in the light of physics: the scope and methods of Halford Mackinder's geography
• Dominic Berry - Biological engineering as genre

18/6/2019

• Veronika Lipphard - Ethnicizing isolation: How narratives guide genetic research in vulnerable populations
• Will Tattersdill - What if dinosaurs survived? Or, reading alternate natural history in science fiction and non-fiction of the late twentieth century

Narrative Science public seminar series

For the abstracts, and details as to the time and location, please check the website: 

15th January 2019:
Sharon Crasnow (Norco College)- 'Counterfactual Narrative in Political Science'
Phyllis Kirstin Illari (UCL)- TBA

29th January 2019:
Ivan Flis (University of Utrecht)- 'Narrating an unfinished science: Scientific psychology in late-twentieth century textbooks'
Adrian Currie (University of Exeter)- 'History is Peculiar​'

12th February 2019:
Alfred Nordmann (Technical University Darmstadt)- 'A Feeling for the Mechanism'
Eleonora Loiodice (Università degli Studi di Bari)- 'Science as a creation: Giorgio de Santillana’s approach to history of science'

26th February 2019:
Annamaria Contini (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)- 'Metaphor as narrative reconfiguration: an example in the French physiology of the late nineteenth century'
Adelene Buckland (King's College London)- 'Plot Problems: Geological Narratives, Anti-Narratives, and Counter-Narratives in the Early Nineteenth Century'

 12th March 2019:
Sarah Dillon (University of Cambridge)- 'Reasoning by Analogy: ELIZA, Pygmalion and the Societal Harm of Gendering Virtual Personal Assistants'
Vito De Lucia (The Arctic University of Norway)- 'Reading law outside of the legal text: legal narratives'

26th March 2019:
Marco Tamborini (Technical University Darmstadt)- 'Narrating the Deep Past'
Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Exeter)- 'From Travel Diary to Species Catalogue: How Linnaeus Came to See Lapland'

 

Narrative Science - website and seminar series

The Narrative Science project is very pleased to announce the launch of its website, and the start of a seminar series that will run in London throughout the rest of 2018 and to the end of summer in 2019. The website, which contains further information about the project and an introduction to its central ideas, can be found here.

Seminar series- Term 1

Each seminar will include two speakers. They will take place between 17:00 and 19:00 on the LSE campus in London, building KSW and room G.01. The KSW building can be found on this map, just on Kingsway road.

9/10/2018

• Sally Atkinson (University of Exeter) Fragile cultures and unruly matters: narrating microbial lives in synthetic biology knowledge practices
• Elisa Vecchione (Group of Pragmatic and Reflexive Sociology, EHESS, Paris) The political necessity of a more poetic science: the case of climate-economic narratives

6/11/2018

• Julia Sánchez-Dorado (UCL) and Claudia Cristalli (UCL) Colligation in model analysis: from Whewell’s tides to the San Francisco Bay Model
• Veronika Lipphardt (University College Freiburg) TBA

20/11/2018

• Caitlin Donahue Wylie (University of Virginia) Narrating Disaster: A Method of Socialization in Engineering Laboratories
• Sigrid Leyssen (University of Bucharest) TBA

4/12/2018

• Lukas Engelman (University of Edinburgh) Epidemiology as Narrative Science: Outbreak reports of the third plague pandemic from 1894 to 1952
• Sabine Baier (LSE and ETH Zürich) TBA

Workshop announcement - Narrative science and its visual practices

9th April 2018

4 travel bursaries for PhD students

As part of the ERC funded Narrative Science project we are hosting a 1 day workshop focussed on the intersection of visual practice and narrative in science. The workshop will take place at the London School of Economics and Political Science, on the 19th of April.

Science abounds with visual materials: exemplary objects, 3D models, photos, diagrams, maps, graphs. Scholars in the history, philosophy and social studies of science have highlighted various features and roles of these objects and the practices in which they are embedded, including reasoning, speculation, demonstration, illustration, communication and others. This workshop focusses on the association of visual practices with narratives in knowledge making. In some cases, visual objects embed narrative qualities in themselves; in other cases, narratives are needed to make sense of the visual materials.

To learn more about the Narrative Science project as a whole, please see the special issue we recently published in Vol. 62 of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.

Workshop spaces are very limited. If you are interested in attending, please write to Dr Robert Meunier as soon as possible.

PhD travel bursaries

To increase participation from the postgraduate community, we are making available 4 travel bursaries, each of a maximum of £250. These can be used to recover the cost of train or airfare for those who wish to attend, and who are currently enrolled on a PhD programme, preferably with research interests directly related to the workshop agenda. To apply for a PhD travel bursary please write to Dr Dominic Berry. Please include: Your name University Affiliation PhD Programme and thesis title And no more than 100 words on how this workshop relates to your research. The deadline for applications to the travel bursary is Friday 6th of April. You will be notified as to the outcome of your application shortly thereafter. Applicants will be selected to ensure a diverse range of research interests and institutions are represented. 

Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network: Narratives and Artificial Intelligence

23 January 2018, 5-7pm
CRASSH, Alison Richards Building, SG1

Chair: Satinder Gill (CIPN)

The AI Narratives project at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence examines how we talk and think about AI, and considers the impact this could have on how it is regarded, developed, and regulated, highlighting the role of humanities research in technological development.


1. Stephen Cave: Hopes and Fears for AI: Four Dichotomies

Rarely has a technology arrived more pre-loaded with associations than the intelligent machine. We categorise those associations into four dichotomies of hopes and fears:

- Ease / Obsolescence

- Dominance / Subjugation

- Gratification / Alienation

- Immortality / Inhumanity

Stephen Cave is Executive Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Philosophy, and Fellow of Hughes Hall, at the University of Cambridge. Stephen earned a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge, then joined the British Foreign Office, where he spent a decade as a policy advisor and diplomat. His research interests currently focus on the nature, portrayal and governance of AI.



2. Sarah Dillon: Displaying Gender

This paper will take a brief interdisciplinary and intersectorial look at the displaying and enacting of gender in artificial intelligence technology and the narratives surrounding.

Films: Ex Machina, Conceiving Ada.

Novels: M. John Harrison's Empty Space.

Sarah Dillon is University Lecturer in Literature and Film in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. She is author of The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007) and Deconstruction, Feminism, Film (2018). Sarah is a Senior Research Fellow at CFI, where she is co-Project Lead on the AI Narratives project, with the Royal Society. Sarah is a public advocate for the importance of the Arts and Humanities and broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4.



3. Kanta Dihal: Personhood

Personhood has been attributed to objects from cars to computers to the Berlin Wall; the latter has even been married. At the same time, some humans have been denied personhood. This talk will explore the issue of personhood in the age of artificial intelligence, with the two robot figures of Sophia and Pepper as key protagonists... or objects of investigation.

TV series and films: Humans (UK)/Real Humans (Sweden); Ex Machina;

Kanta Dihal is the Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the AI Narratives project, and the Research Project Coordinator of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. In her research she explores the public understanding of AI as constructed by fictional and nonfictional narratives. She has recently submitted her DPhil thesis in science communication at the University of Oxford, titled 'The Stories of Quantum Physics.




4. Beth Singler: AI and Film

Dr Beth Singler will talk about the series of four short documentaries she is making on AI and robotics at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, with help from the CFI, Arm, and Little Dragon Films. She will show the first half of Pain in the Machine, the first in the series and the winner of the 2017 AHRC Best Research Film of the Year award. She will discuss how the dissemination of accounts of artificial intelligence can rely on dominant narratives and she will reflect on science, fiction, her films, and their role in public engagement.

Pain in the Machine

Beth Singler is the Research Associate on the "Human Identity in an age of Nearly-Human Machines" project at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, where she is exploring the social and religious implications of advances in Artificial Intelligence and robotics. As an associate research fellow at the CFI she is collaborating on the Narratives of AI project, which is running in partnership with the Royal Society. Beth is an experienced social and digital anthropologist.



Chair: Satinder Gill

Satinder is a Research Affiliate with the Music Faculty, based with the Centre for Music and Science. She is author of Tacit Engagement: Beyond Interaction (2015), editor of a forthcoming book on The Relational Interface: Where Art, Science, and Technology Meet (2018), and member of the Editorial Board of the AI & Society Journal since its establishment in 1987.


To join the CIPN mailing list, subscribe here; to post events relating to the concept of performance to the CIPN mailing list, email here.

Jobs - Post-Doc Positions on a Narrative Science Project

Applications are invited for 3 Post-Docs to work on the EU-funded project Narrative Science under the direction of the principal investigator, Professor Mary S. Morgan at the London School of Economics. This team project will investigate how, when, and why scientists use narratives to explain their work within their own communities. Each researcher will develop their own case materials within the overall project, working - by agreement with the project leader - on particular topics and fields of science past and present.

It is expected that candidates will have a PhD in history of science, or a closely related field (including narrative studies, science communication, etc) provided you have some experience of historical research work; or you must have an equivalent track record of independent and original research.

As part of their application, candidates are asked to write a brief response to the larger project summary, found here.

The job advert is found here (which links to further details and tells you how to apply). The closing date is June 22nd.

There will shortly also be an advert for a Research Fellow to help run the project, and to curate a web-based 'library' of case studies in narrative science.

Candidates are welcome to apply to both.

Talk - Natural Histories and New World Fictions

CFP - Narrating Science: The Power of Stories in the 21st Century

May 24 – 27, 2017, Toronto/University of Guelph

In the latter decades of the twentieth century, discourses on science and technology began to spread beyond the professional communities of scientific experts involved in knowledge production. In the cultural realm, we saw the rise of the “popular science” genre, of science series and documentaries on TV, and, around the turn of the millennium, an increase in the amount, depth, and quality of attention paid to science in literary and mainstream fiction. At the Narrating Science conference, we bring together scholars, scientists, and writers to compare how and to what effect storytelling about science across a spectrum of genres (fiction and non-fiction) and media (print and film) is engaging with different aspects of science (concepts and facts, practice and practitioners, institutions and societal impacts). Novelists Allegra Goodman and Karen Jay Fowler will be joining us with a public reading and discussion of their novels Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. We are interested in what and how stories about science are contributing to understandings of issues of societal concern (e.g. climate change, genetic engineering, nuclear physics, evolution, concepts of cognition, pharmaceutics, nuclear power, scientific ethics and responsibility, etc.), and in how they reflect or embody the specifically global nature of the scientific enterprise (the permeability of national borders to concepts, technologies, and scientists; different cultural and national contexts for the practice and use of science; and culture-dependent popular perceptions of science). If you would like to attend, check for updates about the program and registration after January 1st at www.fictionmeetscience.org. To propose a presentation, send a description of your topic (300 words) for a 30 minute talk, as well as professional biographical information (100 words) by December 9, 2016. Contributions from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as from working scientists, science communicators and writers are welcome, but should be aimed at a multi-disciplinary audience. Send queries and proposals to Susan Gaines at smgaines@uni-bremen.de. Organized by the College of Arts, University of Guelph, Canada, and “Fiction Meets Science” (www.fictionmeetsscience.org) at the Universities of Bremen and Oldenburg, Germany.

BJHS Special Section - Palaeonarratives and Palaeopractices: Excavating and Interpreting Deep History

Group members might be interested in the (open access) special section of the September 2016 issue of the British Journal for the History of Science, on palaeonarratives and palaeopractices, especially guest editor Amanda Rees's 'Stories of stones and bones: disciplinarity, narrative and practice in British popular prehistory, 1911–1935'.

Chemistry World article - on telling stories in science

A brief discussion of narratives and science (as well as links to further readings on the subject) is here.

Narrative & Proof

An extract from Marcus du Sautoy's recent Oxford lecture on mathematics and storytelling can be found here; the full video of the talk is available here.