pointing out those giants, there with the shoulders

So back in April, gg at Skulls in the Stars challenged science bloggers across the disciplines to read and research some classic article in their discipline, and then write a blog post about it.  The results are in, and they’re awesome.  Not just fascinating – this is a potential time suck (with none of the guilt I feel wasting time with old sports clips on YouTube – I mean, it’s reading about science.  Important science!) – but also a really intriguing way to think about introducing a lot of overlapping ideas about scholarship to students.

One – we all know that context is one of the hardest things to figure out when you’re taking your first steps into understanding a new topic or discipline. Which things to read, what do they mean, why were they important, why are they still important  – answers to these questions aren’t immediately apparent to an outsider and scholarship written for other experts takes a lot of the keys to unlocking this discourse for granted.  Each of these posts lifts some disciplinary curtain aside, telling us what to read and why – in language written not for experts but for smart, motivated people who don’t already have that contextual knowledge.

And by showing the significance of a work in a discourse, these bloggers also (in both text and subtext) show us something about what discourse is and how it works in science or scholarship or research.  My hands-down most favorite entry in this series is from the person who issued the initial challenge – the Gallery of Failed Atomic Models – and this entry really gets at what I’m talking about here.  From gg:

It is often said that history is “written by the victors”. While this statement is usually referring to the winners of a military or political conflict, a similar effect occurs in the history of science. Physics textbooks, for instance, often describe the development of a theory in a highly abbreviated manner, omitting many of the false starts and wrong turns that were taken before the correct answer was found. While this is perfectly understandable in a textbook (it is rather inefficient to teach students all of the wrong answers before teaching them the right answer), it can lead to an inaccurate and somewhat sterile view of how science actually works.

And that might be my favorite piece of this project – the view of how science actually works that you get from these articles is anything but sterile.  They’re planning a second go-round of this project, which will be hosted here in about a month.  I’m marking my calendar.  Well not literally.  But I’m glad this will be an ongoing thing.

There’s another version of the first set of posts up at A Blog Around the Clock – organized chronologically, with some great excerpts highlighting what makes each post good.

Thanks to Cognitive Daily for the pointer.