Transcript

• “The ‘How’ of ‘How-to?’”

  Mathias Grote: So, this was to basically divide knowledge up into portions and to take it around and to use it.

  Elaine Leong: In a way, you know, the analogy of these manuals for now is the “Handy” (German for cell phone) rather than the internet.

  Stephanie Hood: Science Social, a podcast series about how science, history, and society connect with and add to the big questions that we all have today. This show is created by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. My name is Stephanie Hood and in each episode I'm joined by guests from our institute to talk about their research, their big questions, and some of the weird and wonderful experiences they’ve had along the way.

  We are sat here at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science today with our masks on so I hope you can hear us okay. And if you hear any birds outside or anything then it’s because we have the windows wide open. I’m just glad it’s not snowing anymore because we would be cold.

  ---

  Stephanie Hood: So, I’m here today with Elaine Leong and Mathias Grote to talk handbooks and manuals. Turns out there's a lot to discuss. Elaine Leong is a lecturer in history at University College London and visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. And her research focuses on medical and scientific knowledge transfer and production. Mathias Grote is a historian of science and Heisenberg fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is working on the history and philosophy of the life sciences with an emphasis on microbial classifications and the role of ancient knowledge.

  Okay, so to get started, I wanted to–this is kind of almost predictable since we are sitting here with our masks on–to start on the topic of the COVID-19 pandemic. If you think about the coronavirus pandemic, we’re learning a lot of things in a very short amount of time, both thinking about our sort of day-to-day routines and also in terms of scientific knowledge. Do you think that this could all end up in manuals at one point? Maybe it already has. So, for example, advice such as how to stay positive in a lockdown or how to bake sourdough bread or how to develop and produce an mRNA vaccine?

  Mathias Grote: Yeah, that’s a great question. There are actually lots of manual-like things around in this pandemic. And just this morning I looked up one thing, namely the nasal swab. That is done anywhere nowadays and people haven’t done it a year before and nobody practically knew how to do this except for medical practitioners. And now it’s not only nurses but people working in a kindergarten, teachers, and everybody who has to do this at a certain point. So, if you go on YouTube you’ll find what probably was a manual before, namely short videos explaining you how to do this. And it’s quite interesting to see the sheer amount and diversity of these videos. There are, of course, some that are very clinical and aseptic and there are others that are cartoons made for children. And the interesting thing is, of course, that this is all online and it's not written now and it’s mostly in images and accessible through the internet.

  Elaine Leong: I think one of the reasons we have so many videos is that the idea of first-hand observation and personal experiences are really important.

  Stephanie Hood: That’s really interesting. For some reason I’ve got now in my head this whole thing with a mask and I’ve definitely seen these kind of meme-type diagram things floating around and probably Twitter or something where they’re like “This is how not to wear your mask” and it’s just about like ten different ways, like under the nose, over the nose, over the eyes. It’s like a whole new bunch of stuff to learn.

  Mathias Grote: And maybe there’s another example that gets a little bit closer to actual science. If you look into the internet, you’ll find that there are huge COVID libraries on all the preprints and articles. Of course, we know that there are probably thousands of them appearing every day and nobody keeps track of this. And that’s where people will certainly, at some point, want something like a handbook maybe that tells them where to find what article, how to categorize them, how they are interconnected, to critically discuss them one against the other. So, it shows you that in these moments where there is new knowledge accumulating, the demand for systematization and these kind of things is automatically developing as well.

  Stephanie Hood: All this information where is all kind of moving around–this seems like something that wouldn’t have happened in earlier pandemics, so such as the Spanish flu or the plague. Did people use manuals then or how did they get information about dealing with a pandemic situation?

  Elaine Leong: There were definitely manuals for dealing with the plague. So, particularly by the 16th/17th century when there was a lot of vernacular popular medical printing across Europe, you have a whole variety of manuals to deal with the plague. They’re of different lengths, they’re geared towards diverse audiences, some of them are like broadsheets, some of them are short pamphlets, some of them are written in prose and I was reading one that was written in verse. And they normally cover the author’s idea of causes for the plague. They tell readers how to recognize the plague by reading the body and signs on the body. And they also talk a little bit about prevention and cure. And they now prove to be some of the key sources to studying popular understandings of the plague as articulated by historical actors. So, it’d be interesting to know what kinds of sources future historians will use to study popular understandings of COVID. Would they be using Instagram posts or would they be using newspapers or pamphlets issued by the WHO?

  Stephanie Hood: So, we have talked about pandemics and about all of this information that’s out there. What actually are handbooks and manuals? It’s a really broad question. What’s their purpose?

  Mathias Grote: What is the purpose of handbooks and manuals? Yeah, it’s a big and tricky question, of course, because people do all kinds of things with books, right? Sometimes they even sit on them, or they use them as weights or something. So, of course, one has to differentiate between the intended use and the abuse, if you will. But if we look into the histories of the papers that we have, of course, portability is the key issue, I would say. Portability connected to practice, right? And the need of this is obvious in all kinds of fields. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with science. It can also relate, of course, to personal instruction, it can relate to belief, it can relate to any sort of practical activity. And it is, if you will, also related to becoming independent of person-to-person transmission, right? Because the usual instruction would be that you have a master and an apprentice and you learn things by looking and by redoing and to have a different layer on top of this of making the knowledge mobile, of allowing it to be transported to different corners of the world–that’s where such written instructions come into place.

  Stephanie Hood: Do you actually have some favorite handbooks or manuals of your own?

  Elaine Leong: Yes, I was looking at that actually. So, for my last book when I was thinking about recipes and everyday knowledge, I looked at lots and lots of domestic manuals. And my, hands down, the favorite one I looked at is called The Experienced Market Man and Woman. Or Profitable Instructions to All Masters and Mistresses of Families. And it was printed in Edinburgh in 1699 and it’s a shopping guide. It tells you how to buy all kinds of provisions and food items from markets. So, it tells you how to identify a good turkey, how to ensure that the eggs you bought are not rotten, and it tells you right at the end how to buy different kinds of fruits. And particularly now, I think this is quite helpful because there are lots of pears and apples available in supermarkets. So, the market guide instructs you that if you pull the stocks out of pears or apples and the stocks come out without breaking, then this particular fruit is rotten to the core. So please don’t buy that. And I think that these kinds of instructions, and this is actually a manual dated–gosh that must be 400 years ago–and it still offers instructions and advice that’s useful to our everyday lives now. And I think this kind of explains a little bit also why we find it so interesting and spend so much time to look at manuals and handbooks.

  Stephanie Hood: That’s a great anecdote. I’m also quite tempted to try that out. I think I’m going to get myself thrown out of Edeka. Okay, this is fascinating and it also brings me really well to my next question I wanted to ask you both: The reason we decided that we wanted to speak with you for our podcast was that you recently published this volume Learning by the Book, which is a British journal for the history of science volume. This is a new volume that is edited by Angela Krieger, Matthias Grote, and Elaine Leong. An open access volume so you can actually get all of the articles online. What interested you about this topic and what actually led to you deciding to create a whole new volume about this?

  Elaine Leong: The project is actually really long-standing and it was started by Mathias and Angela because they shared common interest in looking at instructional materials in the history of 20th century biology.

  Stephanie Hood: Angela Krieger–perhaps I should throw in a little thing here. So, Angela Krieger is the co-editor of your volume Learning by the Book and she’s currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and also a professor at Princeton.

  Mathias Grote: We had the idea–well, or the question dawned upon us that it’s not so easy what the concept of this even is and we need to think about this trans-historically and in different times. And then we were very happy that Elaine was working here with her Minerva group at the MPI and she was interested in early modern handbooks and manuals. And that’s how the group found together.

  Elaine Leong: And I think that we all share a strong interest in trying to understand practices outside formal settings, kind of popular and vernacular practices. And we thought that by looking at manuals and handbooks this would be a really good entryway to understand how knowledge was passed informally between people who may not be expert.

  Stephanie Hood: One of the things or what really inspired me to want to do this podcast with you and to learn more about manuals and handbooks in the history of science and more broadly was just looking through this volume and seeing the breadth of all the different topics that you cover. I mean you go from the ancient period through to the 20th century. You cover so many different disciplines as mathematics, there’s alchemy, there’s the chemistry and life sciences, there’s architecture, you’ve got genetics here, the natural sciences, and you cover so many different places as well. I mean what’s fascinating here is not just the extent of time that handbooks and manuals have been going but also the fact that they were so many places and cover so many different topics. This isn’t just interesting to look at from a historical perspective, I think, but also to connect to some of the phenomena that we see today.

  So, I wanted to talk a bit about the early modern age and citizen science. So, Elaine, with your research, you can almost time travel us back to a family in early modern London who kind of expanded the handbook that they had. Can you describe this case a bit for us?

  Elaine Leong: Yes, absolutely. So, for one of the projects that I'm doing I am looking at a distillation handbook that was printed in the 1650s. And it was translated by a man called John French. And there is this absolutely amazingly wonderful copy at the Wellcome Collection, which has the annotations of the Talamy family from the 1730s. Once they own the book, they began to annotate throughout the entire book. They wrote herbal information, not only in the 140 black pages that they bound into the back of the book, but around the printed text on many, many of the pages of the book. And here the story is fascinating because you have a set of instructions that are designed for an artisanal workshop to distill particular waters or medicines, how to make glassware and how to make furnaces that are then adopted by a household and they inserted a lot of information such as recipes or herbal knowledge that they gathered from family and friends and from other printed books. So, in a way, it’s about how a household customizes or personalizes a set of printed knowledge to suit their everyday household medical and culinary activities.

  Stephanie Hood: I mean, this kind of actually the addition of information was something I wanted to talk about because Verena mentioned this, and we were talking about this a few days ago, where she said “I'm absolutely horrified to think of people writing in the margins of these books”, I would never do that.” I personally do. I mean, the fact that all of this information was getting added to these already printed books. Can you tell us any more about that? I mean...

  Elaine Leong: So historically this idea that we’re not allowed to write in books is relatively recent and historians of reading such as William Sherman have written about this. That it came with the public library, that we began to really privilege books as precious objects and were told not to write into the margins of books. And in fact, if you go back to the early modern period, which is a period I know best, readers were trained to read with some sort of writing instrument in hand. But another really interesting case study, which I think to do with annotations, that I think Mathias is probably a better place to talk about, is of course Stefan and Guaditta’s case study on Mandel.

  Mathias Grote: Yeah, exactly. Thanks. It’s a paper on Gregor Mendel’s classic paper on crossing experiments in genetics. And what they show us is in how far these writings that you find in different editions of this text in the margins can be used as sources. So, this is also another interesting dimension to this that if we think we shouldn’t be writing to the margins, maybe this can be beneficial to later historians at least. So, what they do is to really show the mental process that happens or that occurs when people read and how they retrained or trained themselves with a book in hand, right? So, this brings us back to one of the primordial situations of a handbook or a manual that it’s self-teaching. That people sit down with this book and they think like, oh, I want to learn about this problem or about this technique. And we really also see how people, of course, don’t get to grips with it. They cannot see the point in the first moment or they try to modify something, there are calculation errors that people find or things that are crossed out. So, this is for a historian, of course, a fascinating source that you can go into something that’s not explicitly made for publication but that documents really the process of learning, studying, and of using text to instruct yourself.

  Stephanie Hood: I mean, you kind of talk about all of this marginalia, these things that get written inside the books for the purpose of self-teaching. Can you see any kind of connection then to what today we might call citizen science–this accumulation of knowledge from many different people?

  Elaine Leong: The idea of self-teaching and the idea of people expanding and adding to knowledge is demonstrative of a popularization of science and an openness of the different kinds of actors who can participate in knowledge-making. I guess maybe it paved the way for more structured and formal citizen science, which we have nowadays. I mean, when I think of citizen science, I think of maybe bird banding or all the movements where people are going out to test water quality. So, in that sense the early annotations have a slightly different bent, because they are about accumulation, they are about expanding bodies of knowledge. But I don’t think that the annotators were consciously and in a structured way contributing to large-scale research projects, which is, I think, more what citizen science is nowadays…so maybe a precursor.

  Stephanie Hood: Yeah. Somehow this is making me think of Wikipedia a little bit, which actually brings me to the next question I wanted to ask you about the internet. The internet and digitization are really changing our ways of learning. What are the most prominent or most exciting developments in your eyes in terms of the amount of information that people can get from the internet compared to what they might have got from handbooks and manuals either in the 20th century or in the early modern period?

  Mathias Grote: With Wikipedia the fascinating thing and also the difficult thing is that anybody can add to it. And all these structures that were put into place for printed handbooks, namely editors and publishers and so on, they don’t exist in the format as we know it. Of course, there are people editing Wikipedia and things are read but we know about edit wars, of people writing back and forth against each other, and we know about sites that are Wikipedia articles that are paid for. Not that things like that wouldn’t have happened in print. But that’s, I think, where we are faced with an open and rapidly developing situation that people are adapting to and that people are also trying to find solutions to. And maybe that’s a point for us to reflect on the history, on the printed books and so on. Not that one can directly take the solutions and implant them into the digital world but maybe one could learn about certain processes and certain structures and certain similarities or dissimilarities of these developments.

  Stephanie Hood: Actually, this somehow reminds me a little bit of the conversation that we had, actually, with Angela Krieger when we were talking about doing this podcast. Verena, who is doing our recording at the moment, asked if the internet might be considered the modern equivalent of the handbook and Angela Krieger’s response was that maybe the cell phone would be a better analogy in a way. Why would that be?

  Elaine Leong: Because it’s handy, I think. I also think that now they’re apps for everything, aren’t they? And so many apps in a way are like manuals because they offer a kind of practical and structural information that’s broken down into easily digestible and easily searchable segments.

  Mathias Grote: Yes, absolutely. And there’s maybe another layer to this that could be added: If we think about the aesthetics of mobile devices and the status they have, that people keep them actually very close to their bodies, that people like to buy their personal version of it or customize it. Then there’s also an analogy to these books that were called, for example, Vademecum, so “go with me,” in the earlier times. They weren’t only containers of information, but they were personalized objects.

  Stephanie Hood: I thought it would be interesting to ask how can we compare the rise of the internet and new devices with print and print revolution further back, say in the 15th century?

  Elaine Leong: I think both of these made knowledge more accessible for a greater number of people. But I think in both instances it might be helpful for us not to put too much emphasis on the idea of revolution but on the idea of the coexistence of different kinds of technologies and different kinds of media. So certainly, in the early modern period, even with the introduction of print manuscript remained a really important way to circulate particular kinds of knowledge. People might decide to circulate information in manuscript because they wanted to limit the audiences that were able to access this particular kinds of knowledge. And we can’t forget that, of course, in the early modern period, oral culture was still incredibly important. There’s always a danger of thinking that just because a new technology is introduced other technologies might become obsolete. And I think both in the introduction of the printing technology and also the introduction of new media as ways to communicate knowledge, in both these instances, we can think about the overlap of different kinds of technologies that are being used at the same time.

  Stephanie Hood: I mean, so in a way, the internet and digitization has not only changed our ways of learning but it’s also to some extent democratized knowledge. So, the fact that many different people can access these resources and also change them and share them. So, looking at the other side of the coin, the politicization of knowledge, not only on the internet but also historically: Mathias, in your research you’ve looked at a book which you have here called the Handbuch der biologischen Arbeitsmethoden by Emil Abderhalden. First of all, can you describe these books?

  Mathias Grote: Yeah, so these are just two volumes from a book that has 107 volumes and they are classical books, hardcover, with not leather but some leather substitute binding and deep golden print. That’s one of the volumes. And the other volume looks very different. So, if you found these two at a garage sale, you wouldn’t think that they are part of the same book project. Because the other one is just bound in paper and looks more like a brochure or something. And this just illustrates to you that these bigger handbook series–reference handbooks or encyclopedic handbooks–were sent out in what’s called Lieferung in German, separate “deliveries”. It’s of course stretched over years and if you think of it, it’s almost like a periodical, right? It’s not like the one book that it’s out and then it’s there but it develops over time. And often people would have a subscription and then they would get these brochures and then they would give them to the book binder and bind them. So, this massive amount of bound tomes of books is something that only develops–it’s not ready-made. And it just shows you interestingly how the book, even after it was written and printed, has something of a life of its own.

  Stephanie Hood: It has a rather controversial history. Can you also tell us a bit more about that?

  Mathias Grote: I found this Handbuch der biologischen Arbeitsmethoden - that’s the title - so the “Handbook of the Biological Methods of Working” as a literal translation, an extremely impressive case for a handbook. It was published from 1918/19 to 1939, so you can already imagine where this falls into. The editor is Emil Abderhalden who is a controversial German or Swiss-German life scientist who was also involved in eugenics. That’s of course why it is something that is difficult to look at. But the interesting thing is that he had this idea of bringing all kinds of methods from biology together. What you find in there is: It starts with laboratory methods that we may think of. But then we go to how to observe birds migrating, and even up to legal studies–so forensics. All kinds of things are in there. So, it’s also an interesting concept of biology, right? He’s like a hoover, like a vacuum cleaner going through the country, sucking up all kinds of manuscripts. But then he also has this idea of bringing them into order, or at least he wants to show it to the outside that he does. I don’t think it really works in the end.

  And maybe one last sentence on the political dimension of this: When he started this in 1918 you can imagine the situation of Germany, which had just lost a war and which had also consequences for science, of course. And so, this was also a project for him to reassemble German language science. So, it’s a nationalist project at the end of the war, showing the rest of the world that he thinks that there are still such great resources in this country and so promoting German language science, which has been noted by people from the outside, which thought of this is like a Teutonic monument. And it’s actually not so good because the sentences are too long, there’s too much text, it’s one-directional in that it ignores foreigners who do not write in German and so on. So, these critiques are also interesting because they show you in how far this was considered a political project. And then, of course, much more after 1933 when people couldn’t publish in there anymore or weren’t allowed to publish. But the interesting thing is also that some people, for example Jewish scientists who had to emigrate, their manuscripts were still published in this book afterwards because they were already written or handed in. So, this is not to say that he wanted to promote them or anything like that, but it documents how the political changes map on the changes in the publication and so on.

  Stephanie Hood: On the topic of handbooks and their political and social context and the way that they’re sort of connected. That makes me think also about where this reliable information might come from. I mean, you both mentioned all these different sources of knowledge. So, places such as TikTok, there’s Twitter, there’s Instagram, there’s all of these different forms of knowledge that are out there. How do you think people are going to identify what’s reliable?

  Mathias Grote: Yeah, it seems a new situation with videos. I mean, we did have lots of techniques around for textual media, right? We knew about publishers, for example. We know what is a good publisher and what is not such a good publisher, or a good newspaper and not such a good newspaper or magazine. And it seems like, of course, this is all up in the air. And the sheer amount of things coming in from all directions and the fact that anybody can self-produce and self-edit, of course, makes this much more complex than it ever has been probably. The other face of the coin might be that as we do it, at the moment we also see the artifacts of such structures not being around, right? In the case that things are just being clicked because other people have clicked on them, so because they rank higher. And that, of course, creates artifacts that everybody knows and that are difficult to counter. I mean, not that such things haven’t happened in the scientific literature as well. It’s called the Matthew Effect in that–like the biblical quote I can’t say it properly in English–those who have will be given more or something like that. So, this is an artifact of any usage of media probably, but one that is much more prominent in algorithmic driven media.

  Elaine Leong: So, I think that notions of reliability and I think that when we think about reliability we need to also think about authority. That this, in a way, has to be constructed. So, I think here experiential knowledge is really important which is why the video format is really helpful. So, in the way the video format are representations of personal first-hand experiences of people testing or using particular methods or protocols and they also allow us to think that we’re actually observing these particular methods of doing things in first person as it were. And I think this is what makes the video format so compelling. But there’s another thing that I found really interesting when we’re thinking about reliability: Have you guys read all the newspaper reviews about TikTok and Instagram videos? I think The Guardian has been doing some of this. So, you know like Instagram hacks or Instagram products. And then they send newspaper correspondents out to test all of these products. So, think that, in a way, as a society we’re also moving towards developing, I guess, structures of protocols to test instructions and products that are presented on new media, which, I think, is really fascinating. A new move as it were.

  ---

  Stephanie Hood: This is it for today. If you like what you just heard, we love your support. Click the subscribe button, recommend this to your friends and colleagues, or give us a thumbs up in your favourite podcast app. You can find us on iTunes, Spotify, and anywhere else you can listen to podcasts. Science Social is produced by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Music by Puddington Bear. Then I’m the host, Stephanie Hood. Make sure to follow us on Twitter at @MPIWG and most of all thanks for listening.