News

The AHRC Ordered Universe project has published an article, ‘All the Colours of the Rainbow’ in Nature Physics.

The AHRC Ordered Universe project and associated Science in Culture Theme research network ‘The Scientific Works of Robert Grosseteste: Lost Legacies and the Living Past’ brings together cosmologists and medievalists to investigate the writings of Robert Grosseteste, a 13th century English theologian and Bishop. The project is based at the University of Durham,

‘All the Colours of the Rainbow’, which was principally authored by Hannah Smithson and Tom McLeish, with Giles Gasper, provides the outline of the way in which Robert Grosseteste’s thought on colour moves between his publications De colore ‘On Colour’ and the De iride ‘On the Rainbow’, and the startling ways in which this can be mapped into contemporary models of human colour vision space.

The full article is available at Nature Physics: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v10/n8/full/nphys3052.html.

The interlocking of Grosseteste’s  creative imagination, and the wide range of sources with which he engaged, alongside keen observation (a skill which emerges in his rich use of metaphor and analogy), with modern thought on human vision and an equally creative and imaginative approach to science, produces a powerful kaleidoscope of ideas and possible interactions.

Further information about the project is available here.

Proposals are invited for the third workshop, ‘Science, Pure and Applied: Oliver Lodge, Physics and Engineering’, organized by AHRC Research Network ‘Making Waves: Oliver Lodge and the Cultures of Science, 1875- 1940′ to be held at the University of Liverpool on the 31 October 2014.

Oliver Lodge was a defender of pure science, particularly in the modern university, yet he took a keen interest in how science might be applied throughout his career, taking out patents and setting up businesses.  This workshop, which will take place in the University of Liverpool’s Victoria Building, the opening of which Lodge attended in 1892, examines the distinction between pure and applied science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Speakers already confirmed include Di Drummond (Leeds Trinity), Bruce Hunt (University of Texas), Peter Rowlands (Liverpool), and Matthew Stanley (New York University).

We invite proposals for short papers (20 minutes) for a panel session at this one-day workshop.  Please send proposals (no more than 300 words) to <oliverlodgenetwork@gmail.com> by the 1 September 2014.

This CFP is available for download here.

Further details about the workshop are available here.

The Constructing Scientific Communities project, part of the AHRC’s Science in Culture theme, is inviting proposals for citizen science or ‘citizen humanities’ projects to be developed as part of the Zooniverse.org platform. Proposals are welcome from researchers whose work would benefit from the active participation of tens or even hundreds of volunteers.

The Constructing Scientific Communities project examines citizen science in the 19^th and 21^st centuries, contrasting and reflecting on engagement with distributed communities of amateur researchers in both the historical record and in contemporary practice. Just as Darwin consulted popular natural history magazines and drew on information provided by an army of two thousand correspondents, modern scientists have worked with volunteers to classify galaxies, discover planets, rescue old climate records and speed up cancer research.

Between one and four successful projects will be selected from responses to this call, and will be developed and hosted by the Zooniverse team in association with the applications. We hope to include both scientific and historical projects; those writing proposals should review the existing range of Zooniverse projects which include not only classification but also transcription projects. Please note, however, we cannot distribute funds nor support imaging or other digitization in support of the project.

Projects will be selected by the project team according to the following criteria:

1. Merit and usefulness of the data expected to result from the project.
2. Novelty of the problem; projects which require extending the capability of the Zooniverse platform or serve as case studies for crowdsourcing in new areas or in new ways are welcome.
3. Alignment with the goals and interests of the Constructing Scientific Communities project. In particular, we wish to encourage projects that :
   1. Have a significant historical dimension, especially in relation to the history of science.
   2. Involve the transcription of text, either in its entirety or for rich metadata.

Note it is anticipated that some, but not necessarily all selected projects, will meet this third criterion; please do submit proposals on other topics.

The deadline for submissions is July 25^th 2014.

For more information about the Constructing Scientific communities project and to submit an application, visit http://conscicom.org/proposals/

A new website has been launched by AHRC Large Grant ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries’. Visit the website at http://conscicom.org/ to find out more.

This three year project based at the Universities of Oxford and Leicester, in partnership with the Natural History Museum; the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, and the Royal Society will draw parallels between citizen science in the 19th and 21st Centuries.

When Darwin was developing his theories of evolution he read avidly in popular natural history magazines and sought out information from an army of almost 2000 correspondents. Such engagement with a wide public in the construction of science became increasingly difficult with the development of professional, and highly specialised science, but the emergence of ‘citizen science’ projects has suggested a new way forward. With the creation of vast data sets in contemporary science, there is a need for a new army of volunteers to help classify and analyse the information. The Zooniverse platform, started in 2007 with ‘Galaxy Zoo’, now has over 800,000 participants who contribute to projects from astrophysics to climate science. Significant discoveries have already been made by these volunteers in the field of astronomy. Yet, the structures by which these volunteers might engage with professional science, and through which scientists themselves might draw upon their findings, are not clear, and researchers on the project have been turning to nineteenth-century models of communication to find ways of harnessing this huge popular interest in order to increase the rate of scientific progress.

Further information about the ‘Constructing Scientific Communities’ Large Grant is also available here.

AHRC funded project on Cultural and Scientific Perceptions of Human-Chicken Interactions goes to Glastonbury

The AHRC Science in Culture Theme Large grant project The Cultural and Scientific Perceptions of Human-Chicken Interations has been selected to run a stand in the Green Futures Field Science Tent at Glastonbury Festival from the 25th to the 29th of June 2014.

The project was chosen by Bournemouth University’s Research and Knowledge Exchange to be one of six institutions represented in The Green Futures Field’s Science Tent which this year is run by Dr Anthony Gallagher from Southampton Solent Univerity. The tent will showcase a variety of activities based on scientific research all focused on a common theme of green futures.  Glastonbury encourages public engagement on a wide level with a staggeringly broad range of workshops, crafts and stalls to interact with. Public engagement in a festival environment encourages interaction with a very diverse range of people in a relaxed setting which develops free and open discussion, and as such, a better understanding of the topic at hand.

The Chicken Project’s contribution will offer  members of the public the opportunity to learn more about the origins and subsequent development of our most widely established domestic animal. Post doctoral researcher Dr Julia Best and PhD student Jacqueline Pitt from Bournemouth University will represent the project and run a series of activities to explore the process of domestication, the spread of chickens across the world and the changes that have occurred skeletally, genetically and behaviourally as a result.

Visitors will be encouraged to handle archaeological finds and modern skeletal material to explore how by combining science with archaeology and anthropology we can gain a deeper insight into the past, present and future of the chicken.  Visitors may examine pathological bones to explore avian health, and also identify age and sex indicators to explore meat and egg production. Visitors are invited to try their hand at working out what the chicken’s wild ancestor was, where it came from, and when and how the chicken spread across the world. Using interactive mapping and charting, each visitor will be part of a visual body of knowledge that grows throughout the festival. This dynamic form continues in encouraging younger (and older!) participants draw their preconceptions of chickens which will be displayed around the tent. These will enable us to combine the scientific analysis of bone material and archaeological pottery with the cultural perceptions of chickens in our modern society.

Chickens are our most common domestic animal. With around 1.5 trillion* eggs laid each year, the chicken’s integral role in our lives and our food industry is clearly visible. This AHRC funded project aims to better understand the archaeological origins of this species which has important implications for contemporary issues of food production, sustainability, human health and animal welfare. Further information about the project is available here.

Visit the project stand at Glastonbury to find out more about this AHRC funded research. There will be bones and artefacts to handle, interactive charting to engage with, historical recipes to explore, links to modern poultry keeping and much more.

Follow @chicken_project on Twitter #Glastochicken to find out more. Further information about the AHRC Human- Chicken Interactions project can be found in this blog post, ‘Hen-pecked: The Bird that conquered the world’.

AHRC Large Grant ‘Rethinking the Senses: Uniting the Philosophy and Neuroscience of Perception’ is collaborating with artists Rosalyn Driscoll, Tereza Stehlikova and Anais Tondeur to organise a participatory Art event- Moving Water that will take place at the October Gallery, London from 19th to 21st June.

As part of the Moving Water event, members of the audience are invited to take part in an embodied sensory experience of our biological, psychological, cultural understanding of water.

Audience members will handle sculptural vessels, containing water,  made from sensuous materials such as glass, rawhide, metal and clay in an experience intended to reveal how the human body itself is a vessel for water. The project is supported by Encounter Fine Arts.

In addition to the Moving Water collaboration, ‘Rethinking the Senses’ is collaborating with artists Rosalyn Driscoll, Tereza Stehlikova and Anais Tondeur, part of the group Sensory Sites, on other projects. This aim of this partnership is to further understand how all of the senses work together and shape conscious experiences of the outside world and our own bodies.

Collaboration will allow Sensory Sites to build on AHRC funded research to enhance the sensory effects used in their exhibitions while the Rethinking the Senses team will use the exhibition environment as an opportunity for sensory research and experiment.

The Sensory Sites team commented ‘We are appealing to all the senses by using light, sound, music, space, the room, and above all, the tactile experience of the vessels and the water inside them. The vessels speak the languages of water, mediating between the water within them and the water in our bodies, giving us an intimate, felt sense of water’s qualities, use, ubiquity and loss.’

Moving Water will be performed to the public from 7pm at the October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, Bloomsbury, London, WC1N 3AL on 20th and 21st June. Please RSVP via tickets@encounterfineart.com to register for a FREE tickets for the event.

The AHRC Science in Culture Theme is featuring in a UK-wide campaign this week (9th to 15th June 2014) to highlight the value and importance of university research to our everyday lives.

The Science in Culture Theme will launch a series of guest blog posts throughout the week to showcase research, in UK Universities, funded by the Theme.

Universities Week 2014 is a UK wide initiative to promote and engage the public with the value and importance of university research.

Events will be taking place across UK universities and at the Natural History Museum there will be a week-long public event to showcase some of the best of UK university research.

Follow us @AHRCSciculture to join in the #IdeasforLife campaign

Journalist Ewen Callaway reports on the AHRC Science in Culture Theme Large grant, Cultural and Scientific Perceptions of Human- Chicken Interactions, in this week’s edition of Nature, 28/05/2014.

The full article in available on the Nature website and as a PDF below:

Chicken-project-gets-off-the-ground.pdf

A film of Professor Sally Shuttleworth, Dr Sally Frampton and Dr Geoff Belknap’s recent talk at the Oxford Martin School , ‘Dear Mr Darwin’: What can we learn from 19th Century Science’ is available to watch online.

Professor Sally Shuttleworth, Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, Dr Sally Frampton, Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of Oxford, and Dr Geoff Belknap, Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of Leicester talked about the role of Citizen Science in their AHRC Large Grant project Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries.

The project uses the framing of ‘Citizen Science’ to consider how ‘public’ participation in science was understood in the nineteenth century. The project brings together historical and literary research in the nineteenth century with contemporary scientific practice, looking at the ways in which patterns of popular communication and engagement in nineteenth-century science can offer models for current practice.

This talk is part of a seminar series on citizen science, ‘Trusting the crowd: solving big problems with everyday solutions’.

A recording of the event is available to watch below: