Abstract
El artículo explora las dificultades que, para la historia de la ciencia y la tecnología del siglo XX, supone la lectura de un gran número de artículos científicos. Se argumenta que hay tensión entre dos estrategias distintas: la lectura en detalle de los artículos clave y el análisis de citaciones y otros métodos automáticos de rastrear la literatura. El desafío que supone alternar estos dos métodos y la necesidad de mantener una aproximación interpretativa cuando nos enfrentamos a una extensa literatura (miles o decenas de miles de artículos) pueden ser abordados aproximándonos a la literatura científica como si de un informante se tratara, en el sentido antropológico. Caracterizamos a la literatura científica como capaz de describir el cambio en los conceptos y en las prácticas científicas y técnicas. El artículo explora esta estrategia y propone centrarse en asuntos tales como los materiales y métodos (y las prácticas que conllevan), así como en los problemas a los que éstos contribuyen o intentan solucionar. The article explores the difficulties, for the history of science and technology of the twentieth century, is reading a large number of scientific articles. It is argued that there is tension between two different strategies: detailed reading of key articles and citation analysis and other automated methods to track the literature. The challenge of alternate these two methods and the need to maintain an interpretive approach when faced with an extensive literature (thousands or tens of thousands of items) can be addressed approaching the scientific literature as if it were an informant in the anthropological sense. We characterize the literature as able to describe the change in the concepts and practices in science and technology. The article explores the strategy and intends to focus on issues such as materials and methods (and practices involved), as well as the problems they help or try to solve.
Highlights
We have three impulses feeding into an approach to the Literature, but their interrelation is not self-evident: (1) a commitment to the necessity and productivity of doing highly specific empirical work on the general – working at the level of the mass of publication as well as the individual instance, (2) a revived interest in the tools of citation analysis and more recent quantitative tools that give us interesting access to the collective representations of large numbers of scientific contributors, and (3) the insights of rhetoric of science or close reading, which give us tools of close attention to language and persuasion
Reading for problematizations can be understood, perhaps, as a contribution to historical epistemology in an era when reading practices, and definintions of understanding, must confront the massive amount of literature being produced in the 20th century. These three modes of approaching The Literature could be supplemented by many others, derived perhaps from questions already clear in the history of science
Asking scientists for a map of The Literature might be seen as one kind of interpretation or reading of the literature as a work
Summary
Moretti’s innovation has been to bring quantitative methods and the visualization devices of graphs, maps and trees to a field traditionally dominated by the close examination of a small selection of texts. Whereas the field of literary analysis has effectively resisted any large scale application of these quantitative tools to the The Literature, science and technology are by contrast well studied by the fields of bibliometrics, informetrics, scientometrics and the analysis of science and technology indicators generally (Borgman and Furner 2002) While these fields share a filiation with the history of science and science studies broadly, their use in historical or social analysis has remained limited (but cf Gingras 2009 for a revival). Like the rhetorical analysis of science, chooses texts for reasons that do not reflect their inclusion in a literature-they are important because they are written by a particular author, or are cited most frequently, or are generally included in collections of «key papers.». Like the rhetorical analysis of science, chooses texts for reasons that do not reflect their inclusion in a literature-they are important because they are written by a particular author, or are cited most frequently, or are generally included in collections of «key papers.» One cannot «close read» ten thousand papers, to be sure, but can one pay a similar kind of close attention to The Literature as such? It is to this question that we turn in the final section
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