This article focuses on transformations in the main metaphors in ancient to late medieval titles of Chinese medical books used to convey to potential readers their ‘learning-by-the-book’ contents. It finds that in contrast to the European preference for hand metaphors in the genre terms – enchiridions, manuals and handbooks – the Chinese medical archive preserves bodily metaphors within which the hand metaphor appears only rarely in the early medieval period and is then superseded by metaphors that rely on the fingers and palms more than the hands per se. This longue durée survey from roughly the fourth to the fourteenth centuries of the wide-ranging metaphors for ‘handy medical books’ places their historical emergence and transformation within the history of Chinese medical manuscripts and printed texts. Metaphors in medical titles conveyed to potential readers at the time significant textual innovations in how medical knowledge would be presented to them. For later historians, they provide evidence of profound changes in managing an increasingly complex and expanding archive of Chinese medical manuscripts and printed texts. Innovations in textual reorganization intended to facilitate ‘learning by the book’ were often creatively captured in an illuminating range of genre distinctions, descriptors and metaphors.

In the early twentieth century, encyclopedias addressed to children and youths became special reference works concerning science and technology education. In search of greater comprehension of this historical process, I analyse The Children's Encyclopedia’s representation of science and technology, and how it was re-edited by the North American publishing company that bought its copyrights and promoted its circulation in several countries. Furthermore, I examine how its contents were appropriated in its translations into Portuguese and Spanish, which circulated in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century. The comparison between the different versions reveals that the writings of science and technology are practically the same, with significant changes only in literature and in the approach of historical and geographical themes. I then argue that, even keeping the scientific contents virtually unchanged, these versions of the encyclopedia gave it a new meaning, because of the contexts in which they circulated. Finally, I show how the appropriations of the encyclopedia contributed to the promotion of scientific values and technological innovation as the core development and as a model of civilization for South American nations.

This essay takes the Hunterian Museum's collections, and particularly the large collection of anatomical preparations, as a case study to isolate the role of collections in disciplinary consolidation and change. I examine a large, unstudied paper archive of catalogues and inventories that strive to organize and account for objects, but more often reveal the collection's gradual transformation through continual losses and gains. This evidence indicates that while collections provide the material basis for object-based disciplines, the end of a collection does not necessarily support established or emergent disciplinary norms. As I show, it is in fact disorder in both the documentary archive and physical collections – and especially instabilities introduced by external circumstances that individuals can exploit but cannot control – that allows a collection to be mobilized, surreptitiously, for disciplinary ends.

In 1972, ten members of the machine intelligence research community travelled to Lake Como, Italy, for a conference on the ‘social implications of machine intelligence research’. This paper explores their varied and contradictory approaches to this topic. Researchers, including John McCarthy, Donald Michie and Richard Gregory, raised ‘ethical’ questions surrounding their research and actively predicted risks of machine intelligence. At the same time, they delayed any action to mitigate these risks to an uncertain future where technical capabilities were greater. I argue that conference participants’ claims that 1972 was ‘too early’ to speculate on societal impacts of their research were disingenuous, motivated both by threats to funding and by researchers’ own politically informed speculation on the future.

Between 1986 and 1996 researchers at the AT&T Bell Laboratories Adaptive Systems Research Department curated thousands of images of handwritten digits assembled by the United States Postal Service to train and evaluate artificial neural networks. In academic papers and conference literature, and in conversations with the press, Bell Labs researchers, executives and company spokespeople deployed the language of neurophysiology to position the systems as capable of codifying and reproducing feats of perception. Interpretations such as these were pivotal to the formation of brain–computer imaginaries that surrounded the development of the systems, which obscured the institutional infrastructures, clerical and cognitive labour, and the manipulation and maintenance of data on which feats of ‘recognition’ depended. Central to building the group's networks was the development of data sets constructed in consort with the US Postal Service, which arbitrated between the practicality of conducting research and the representation of an extensive catalogue of possible forms and permutations of handwritten digits. These imaginaries, which stressed a likeness with the human brain, were compounded by the promotion of ‘successful applications’ that took place under the AT&T corporate umbrella and with the essential support of US Postal Service workers to correct system errors.

The article explores the extent and nature of the relationship between Darwinian science and the British Empire. It does so by unpicking Darwin's British Indian examples of avian combat in constructing his ‘law of battle’. The article shows how Darwin's interpretation of these reports was simultaneously enabled, shaped and limited by the imperial context within which the reports were generated. Particularly important was Darwin's inability to see the enormous investment of human labour and complex knowledge in sculpting and curating these avian fights through a culture of shauq. Partly this oversight followed from the South Asian birds having already been saturated by Romantic poetic associations, even before Darwin began considering them. Somewhat surprisingly, I note, Clifford Geertz shared Darwin's blindness towards the ‘cultural’ sculpting of ‘nature’ during avian combat.

During the Cold War, UNESCO played a major role in promoting science education across the world. UNESCO's Programme in Integrated Science Teaching, launched in 1969, placed science education at the heart of socio-economic development in all nations. The programme planners emphasized the role of science education in the development of human resources necessary to build a modern nation state, seeking to build a scientific and engineering mindset in children. UNESCO's interest in science education drew inspiration from early Cold War curriculum reforms in the United States, where scientists, psychologists and teachers promoted science education as a way to enhance the scientific and technical workforce and to counteract irrational tendencies. While US curriculum reformers were concerned about the quantity and quality of science teaching in secondary school, UNESCO wanted to introduce science as a topic in primary, secondary and vocational schools, promoting integrated science teaching as the best way to do this. From the outset, the term ‘integrated’ meant different things to different people. It not only entailed less focus on scientific disciplines and scientific method strictly defined, but also more on teaching children how to adopt a curious, experimental and engineering approach in life. By the end of the Cold War, UNESCO abandoned the idea of integrated science teaching, but it has a lasting legacy in terms of placing ways of teaching science to children at the heart of modern society.

Little historical work examines the problems, practices and values of ‘machine learning’ as it was understood and justified within pattern recognition research communities prior to the 1980s. This omission has led to a failure to appreciate how the efficacy of machine learning was often justified by its perceived capacity for ‘originality’ rooted in machine (and human) subjectivity. This paper examines why and how early 1950s pattern recognition researchers came to see ‘machine learning’ as a technical and epistemological set of nominalist strategies for performing induction and abduction given incomplete, complex or contradictory information that might also spur ‘creative’ insight in such diverse activities as political judgement and scientific inquiry. I document local research problems, epistemological commitments, institutional contexts and the circulation of ‘machine-learning’ practices and values through three cases of early-career researchers imagining, building and programming digital computers to ‘learn’ from 1950 to 1953. This machine learning implemented in learning programs came to be seen by some researchers as more efficacious descriptions of the natural and social world because these descriptions were perspective-dependent, profoundly contingent and contextually non-exhaustive. Often indexed as colloquial appeals to greater ‘generality’, conceptions of machine learning's efficacy as the capacity to make meaning from contradictory information continues to inform contemporary debates regarding artificial intelligence, society and possibility.

This article explores an early computer algebra system called MACSYMA – a repository of automated non-numeric mathematical operations developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from the 1960s to the 1980s, to help mathematicians, physicists, engineers and other mathematical scientists solve problems and prove theorems. I examine the extensive paper-based training materials that were produced alongside the system to create its users. Would-be users were told that the system would free them from the drudgery of much mathematical labour. However, this ‘freedom’ could only be won by adapting to a highly disciplined mode of problem solving with a relatively inflexible automated assistant. In creating an automated repository of mathematical knowledge, MACSYMA developers sought to erase its social context. However, looking at the training literature, we see that the social operates everywhere, only recoded. This article uses the paper-based training materials to uncover the codes of conduct – both social and technical – that coordinated between the users, developers and machines that constituted the system.

The analysis of a painting attributed to the rangaku scholar Shiba Kōkan is the occasion to recover the genesis of a stereotypical narrative of Japanese scientific modernization and to survey the role of books in the intellectual life of Tokugawa naturalists. For the practitioners of materia medica (honzōgaku), the knowledge of nature began and ended with, and in between continuously referred to, books – Chinese, Japanese and later ‘Dutch’. Canonical texts gave scholars terminology, taxonomy, philosophical justification and legitimation, but not all books had equal value in affecting scholars’ practices. A precise hierarchy, in fact, organized texts, from canonical encyclopedias to private fieldnotes, into ‘textual institutions’ that encouraged further research at the same time that they regulated and framed scholars’ cognitive claims.