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preserves bodily metaphors within which the hand metaphor appears only rarely in the early medieval period and is then superseded by metaphors that rely on the fingers and palms more than the hands per se.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.

The origin of human language has been a perennial – and perennially controversial – topic in linguistics since the nineteenth century. Much of this work has engaged themes Charles Darwin set out in The Descent of Man, though few authors acknowledge the text directly. How might we interpret such neglect? This essay contends that Darwin's reflections on language challenged foundational commitments in linguistics about the barrier between the history and prehistory of human communication. These commitments are thrown into relief through a detailed study of the dissenting symbolic and gestural theory of language origin put forth by Mary LeCron Foster, who rejected doctrines of linguistic arbitrariness and transformational-generative grammar. Her work on the frontier between animal and human communication is presented through a description of her ‘phememic’ account of the language origins. The paper also emphasizes the rhythm of Foster's career, which provides a significant counterpoint to standard accounts of the development and institutionalization of American linguistics during the twentieth century.

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.

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.

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.

Drawing from recent theoretical insights on the circulation of knowledge, this article, grounded in real-world examples, illustrates the importance of ‘the site’ as an analytical heuristic for revealing processes, movements and connections illegible within either nation-centred histories or comparative national studies. By investigating place instead of project, the study reframes the birth of modern rocket developments in both China and India as fundamentally intertwined within common global networks of science. I investigate four seemingly disconnected sites in the US, India, China and Ukraine, each separated by politics but connected and embedded in conduits that enabled the flow of expertise during (and in some cases despite) the Cold War. By doing so, it is possible to reconstruct an exemplar of a kind of global history of science, some of which takes place in China, some in India, and some elsewhere, but all of it connected. There are no discrete beginnings or endings here, merely points of intervention to take stock of processes in action. Each site produces objects and knowledge that contribute to our understanding of the other sites, furthering the overall narrative on Chinese and Indian efforts to formalize a ‘national’ space programme. The focus on these four sites reveals a global network of science in motion, linked by the common goals of building powerful rockets to explore space.

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.