{"id":1540,"date":"2017-05-05T11:54:50","date_gmt":"2017-05-05T15:54:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/?p=1540"},"modified":"2017-05-05T11:54:50","modified_gmt":"2017-05-05T15:54:50","slug":"alex-csiszar-amping-up-scientific-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/?p=1540","title":{"rendered":"Alex Csiszar: Amping up Scientific Publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F321117753&#038;auto_play=false&#038;hide_related=false&#038;visual=false&#038;show_comments=true&#038;show_user=true&#038;show_reposts=false&#038;color=ff5500\"><\/iframe>\n<p>Did you know that the phrase \u201camp it up\u201d is a tribute to a 19th century French scientist? In this episode of Houghton75 we speak with Alex Csiszar, Associate Professor of the History of Science, about his research on Andre Marie Amp\u00e9re&#8217;s electromagnetic experiments and his equally remarkable experiments in scientific publishing.<\/p>\n<p>Find out more about the exhibition and Houghton Library\u2019s 75th anniversary celebrations at <a href=\"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/hist-75h\">http:\/\/houghton75.org\/hist-75h<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Music<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Dara O Shayda<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/dara-o-shayda\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/dara-o-shayda<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>Podcast Transcript and Music Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>[Title sequence background music: Fireworks, Igor Stravinsky, performed by the <a href=\"https:\/\/hro.squarespace.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra<\/a>]<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Alex Csiszar: Houghton is just this amazing place.<br \/>\nDeidre Lynch: It\u2019s fascinating.<br \/>\nStephen Greenblatt: It\u2019s yours for the asking, and that is incredible!<br \/>\nStephanie Sandler: Plus it\u2019s cool.<\/p>\n<p>James Capobianco (JC): Welcome to Houghton75. I\u2019m James Capobianco.<\/p>\n<p>Hannah Ferello (HF): And I\u2019m Hannah Ferello.<\/p>\n<p><strong>[end music]<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>JC: Houghton Library opened its doors at Harvard in 1942. Throughout 2017, we\u2019re celebrating the library\u2019s world-class collections, and support of research and teaching over the last 75 years.<\/p>\n<p>HF: This podcast is only one of the ways to participate in our year-long program of events that promises a unique glimpse of some of Houghton\u2019s most treasured holdings and the way they inspire scholars and students. Visit <a href=\"http:\/\/houghton75.org\">houghton75.org<\/a> for more information.<\/p>\n<p><strong>[background music: <a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/dara-o-shayda\/annular-eclipse-counterpoint\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Annular Eclipse: Counterpoint 2nd Series<\/a>, by <a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/dara-o-shayda\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dara O Shayda<\/a>. Used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (<a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/3.0\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">CC BY 3.0<\/a>)]<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>JC: Did you know that the phrase \u201camp it up\u201d is a tribute to a 19th century French scientist? The term \u201camp\u201d refers to Andr\u00e9-Marie Amp\u00e8re, a physicist who founded the study of electrodynamics, or electromagnetism. He also developed a technique for measuring electricity, leading to our name for a single unit of electric current: the ampere or amp.<\/p>\n<p>HF: We spoke with Alex Csiszar, Associate Professor of the History of Science here at Harvard, about his research on Amp\u00e9re&#8217;s electromagnetic experiments and received a bonus lesson about Amp\u00e8re&#8217;s equally remarkable experiments in scientific publishing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>[end music]<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Alex Csiszar (AC): Amp\u00e8re got going in the field of electricity in about 1820. Before that he was as much a philosopher and a jack-of-all intellectual trades as anything else. He was deeply interested in the unity of nature, as many philosophers and even natural philosophers at the time were. In about 1820 a scientist elsewhere, Hans Christian \u00d8rsted, had realized there was some interesting connection between magnetic phenomena and electrical currents. And this got Amp\u00e8re really excited because it suggested that these two forces in nature might actually be one. So he immediately started experimenting in a big way on electrical currents and magnets, and he immediately realized all sorts of interesting things. He realized that if he took two wires carrying currents, they could attract one another or deflect one another in complex ways suggesting that there was some sort of magnetic phenomenon going on. He realized he could create a bar magnet, or something that acted like a bar magnet, simply by taking the electrical current and winding it in a loop. So he created basically the first electromagnet. And this led him to even more complex experiments in which he attempted to come up with a general theory of electromagnetism, what he called \u201celectrodynamics.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>HF: Naturally, Amp\u00e8re wanted to formally announce and publish his discoveries. This was groundbreaking science! If Amp\u00e8re didn\u2019t make a claim quickly, someone else may beat him to it!<\/p>\n<p>JC: But writing a book takes time\u2026.and then you have to find a publisher. Luckily for Amp\u00e8re, the 19th century brought about a new publishing option for scholarly authors.<\/p>\n<p>AC: He wanted to get this out there very quickly because everybody was doing experiments on this same topic. So he started publishing journal articles all over the place. This was just the moment where you could start doing this because a multiplicity of journals was actually a new thing at this time. There was a snag, however, in that publishing journal articles was great to get it out there that you had done something, but if you wanted a general literary reputation, which a lot of savants did, you would still want to publish a book to get things together into a totality, into a whole. And that\u2019s sort of what led to this book.<\/p>\n<p><strong>[background music: <a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/dara-o-shayda\/puppis-a-x-ray-tapestry\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Puppis A X-Ray Tapestry<\/a>, by <a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/dara-o-shayda\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dara O Shayda<\/a>. Used under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (<a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc\/3.0\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">CC BY-NC 3.0<\/a>)]<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Amp\u00e8re would publish these journal articles, but he would ask the printers and publishers of the journals to produce hundreds and hundreds of extra copies. And he would ask them to do this in a very specific way. He asked them to use a very particular style of pagination where there would be parentheses centered at the top of the page with the number. He asked them to start at a particular page number, and to use generally a certain kind of format, certain size of the book. And this more or less worked. As he published each journal article he told the next editor what page number to use, and slowly over about three years he produced what looked very much like a book. And then he had another printer print a title page and table of contents, he assembled it all, and then he sent it out across Europe and he even put it on sale with various booksellers.<\/p>\n<p>JC: Requesting extra copies, or offprints, of published journal articles was a very common practice. Authors wanted these offprints so that they could distribute them to their friends, colleagues, and rivals who were not subscribed to the journal.<\/p>\n<p>HF: The type was already set so it wouldn\u2019t have been difficult for the printer to make a few extras, and small edits such as pagination would not have been difficult to accommodate.<\/p>\n<p>JC: But using offprints for a full volume must have required a great deal of organization for Amp\u00e8re. Unsurprisingly, there is evidence of a few snags Amp\u00e8re encountered along the way.<\/p>\n<p><strong>[end music]<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>AC: The title of the book, which as you can see is actually kind of long, in English it\u2019s \u201cA collection of electrodynamic observations, containing diverse memoirs, notices, extracts of letters, periodical works, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera\u2026\u201d It\u2019s not entirely secret that this is a collection. What\u2019s perhaps a little more hard to tell is that it\u2019s not simply a sort of book of collected works, which is a common enough thing even at this time. It\u2019s that it physically is a collection of different publications.<\/p>\n<p>Even more interesting is the verso facing where it says that \u201cthis work can be found at the following booksellers,\u201d and lists various booksellers in various European cities, which suggests that, indeed, it was available to be bought. It wasn\u2019t simply something that Amp\u00e8re sent around. And then there\u2019s a very interesting note. It says, \u201cPeople who have copies of this book that are incomplete can send it back to their bookseller and have them exchanged at no cost for complete versions.\u201d Which is not something you usually see, and indeed, why does it exist? It\u2019s because Amp\u00e8re realizes that there\u2019s going to be trouble in actually assembling this and making it work.<\/p>\n<p>And, indeed, when you look at different copies of this book, they\u2019re almost never exactly the same. They\u2019re always a little weird or different. Even the ones like this one here that we\u2019re looking at which seem to be complete and regular, there are still some strange things. For instance, if you go to the back of the book, here\u2019s the Table of Contents. It ends with this last little thing here on page 354: Observation additionnelle par M. Amp\u00e8re. We can go to that, 354, and there it is, but then when you get to the end of it, you find that the end is page 364 and there\u2019s another article at page 365! That\u2019s not in the Table of Contents, which suggests that he published something else through the same scheme but he\u2019d already sent the Table of Contents to the printer and couldn\u2019t change it.<\/p>\n<p>JC: Although brilliant, this scheme does seem a little unsavory.<\/p>\n<p>HF: But Amp\u00e8re wasn\u2019t the only famous scientist publishing his works as offprints. Apparently, this was a common practice!<\/p>\n<p>AC: There are some other examples I\u2019ve found, but they aren\u2019t quite like this. The most famous one that I know of is another famous French naturalist, Georges Cuvier, a famous comparative anatomist, probably the most powerful savant in France when Amp\u00e8re was doing this. Cuvier did something very similar, in the 1810s. He put together offprints, and then sold and distributed the resulting book. It was a book about the fossil bones of quadrupeds. However, if you look at that book it looks very different from this. Cuvier made no attempt to get the page numbers right. He made no attempt to make the pages really line up. He did, however, print a preface and a title page and a table of contents. But if you look at it, it looks like what it is. It\u2019s a collection of offprints put together in a pretty ragtag way and then distributed.<\/p>\n<p>That particular technique isn\u2019t so uncommon. Again, because there was this urge to publish large, unified treatments of things, many naturalists published articles in series. They would be called \u201cExperimental Researches 1,\u201d \u201cExperimental Researches 2,\u201d \u201cExperimental Researches 3,\u201d and they would come out in various periodicals and readers themselves would often put them together. Again, offprints being sent around were very, very common. You might argue that distributing your work through offprints that you got from a journal was one of the main reasons that you would publish something in a journal. Because who actually subscribed to all of these journals that were showing up? Very few people. And you wanted to make sure the right people got them. You would ask for a lot of offprints in order to distribute them to your friends, and to mentors, and to competitors in the form of these little pamphlets. Amp\u00e8re did that as well, but he went one step further by putting them all together and distributing them himself in this way. Publishing by parts was very common in the sciences, again because it was very risky to publish a whole book. It would\u2019ve been very difficult, or could\u2019ve been difficult for Amp\u00e8re to convince a publisher to publish a whole book and send it out. This way he could do it himself, he could do it cheaply, and with basically no risk.<\/p>\n<p>HF: This book is an artifact of a transitional time in publishing history. Scholarly journals, so familiar to us today, were just starting to gain popularity.<\/p>\n<p>JC: Books of course, were and remained important, but their role was shifting. According to Professor Csiszar, the shifting publishing landscape led to a major change in the sharing of scientific information.<\/p>\n<p>AC: This book, in many ways, encapsulates one of the main ideas I\u2019ve been trying to put forward in my own work. It encapsulates a major transition in the way in which savants thought about how to put their work out there, and indeed what was worth putting out into the world as a scientific finding. When Amp\u00e8re wrote this book and when Amp\u00e8re came of age as a savant, what often mattered was a big discovery claim of some kind. Some sort of theory of the world. And that\u2019s very much what Amp\u00e8re, this dedicated Romantic philosopher, wanted to produce. He wanted to produce a theory of the world, a unified theory of nature in some ways. And books are much better for that than little articles. On the other hand, all these journals, these commercial scientific journals, had begun to proliferate everywhere and they were great if you wanted to stake your claim to some sort of small discovery claim. And so Amp\u00e8re used them all the time in order to say \u201cI\u2019ve done this. Pay attention. This is something that I deserve credit for.\u201d This was in sort of tension with this urge to publish books. So, this book, in many ways, represents the awkward coming together of these two movements where Amp\u00e8re wanted to in some sense do both of these things at the same time: create a unified theory of the world and get his work out there as fast as possible.<\/p>\n<p>In my own work I take this for granted, but it\u2019s not obvious that looking at the actual material objects in the case of the history of science would tell you anything. When we do literary history, there\u2019s a lot of people who focus on the books themselves because it\u2019s supposed to be all about books. But history of science is supposed to be about knowledge, abstract ideas, equations, formulas. But actually you learn a lot about how people thought about knowledge and science by looking very closely at the books themselves. And this book by Amp\u00e8re is a really, really amazing example of this.<\/p>\n<p><strong>[background music: <a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/dara-o-shayda\/kepler-lament\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fughetta: Kepler\u2019s Lament<\/a>, by <a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/dara-o-shayda\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dara O Shayda<\/a>. Used under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported License (<a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/3.0\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">CC BY-NC-SA 3.0<\/a>)]<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>JC: We\u2019d like to thank Professor Alex Csiszar for joining us and sharing his detailed knowledge of Amp\u00e8re and scientific publishing with us today. We are now so accustomed to scholarly journals and articles, it\u2019s fascinating to think of a time when these vital publications were just starting to circulate.<\/p>\n<p>HF: The music you\u2019ve heard throughout the podcast was a selection of science inspired electronic and experimental pieces by Dara O Shayda. They can all be found on Soundcloud, and are used here through creative commons licenses.<\/p>\n<p>JC: If you would like to take a closer look at Amp\u00e8re\u2019s book of offprints or any of the other exciting items on display in HIST75H: A Masterclass on Houghton Library, check out our online exhibition at <a href=\"http:\/\/houghton75.org\">houghton75.org<\/a>. Although the physical exhibition is now closed, you are always welcome to visit the library and request to view Amp\u00e8re\u2019s book or other collection material in our reading room.<\/p>\n<p>HF: If you would like to view podcast transcripts or detailed musical notes, please visit <a href=\"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/podcast\">houghton75.org\/podcast<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>JC: Thanks, as always, for listening, and whether you are tuning in from near or far, we hope you\u2019ll join us again for next week\u2019s episode of Houghton75.<\/p>\n<p><strong>[music continues to end]<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F321117753&#038;auto_play=false&#038;hide_related=false&#038;visual=false&#038;show_comments=true&#038;show_user=true&#038;show_reposts=false&#038;color=ff5500\"><\/iframe>\n<p>Did you know that the phrase \u201camp it up\u201d is a tribute to a 19th century French scientist? In this episode of Houghton75 we speak with Alex Csiszar, Associate Professor of the History of Science, about his research on Andre Marie Amp\u00e9re&#8217;s electromagnetic experiments and his equally remarkable experiments in scientific publishing.<\/p>\n<p>Find out more about the exhibition and Houghton Library\u2019s 75th anniversary celebrations at http:\/\/houghton75.org\/hist-75h<\/p>\n<p>Music<\/p>\n<p>Dara O Shayda<br \/>\nhttps:\/\/soundcloud.com\/dara-o-shayda<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-podcast"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7SlKy-oQ","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1540"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1639,"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1540\/revisions\/1639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/houghton75.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}