History of Knowledge

Cognition is the most socially-conditioned activity of man, and knowledge is the paramount social creation [Gebilde].  – Ludwik Fleck

Cofounded with Kerstin von der Krone for the German Historical Institute (GHI), Washington, DC, in late 2016, History of Knowledge was the first blog in the institute’s scholarly publishing program.

We had initially been asked to explore the possibility of a history of knowledge web portal, but we successfully made the case for a blog. This subfield of history was not cohesive enough for a big portal. In the English-speaking academy, many of us did not even know what “history of knowledge” meant. A blog could play a useful role by publicizing the topic and developing a preliminary sketch of its contours.

Besides setting up and maintaining the site, my work on the project ranged from commissioning and reviewing pieces with my co-editor(s) to developmental editing, line-editing, copyediting, and image rights review. I also wrote copy for the blog and used social media to grow its readership and exchange ideas (see below). By April 2021, we had published over 230,000 words by more than 100 authors. That much content could have filled two academic books of the type I editedŵ for the institute.

Of special note, we published two substantial pre-conference blog series:

To learn how we understood our subject matter and mission in their specific context, see:

Social media engagement:

We had a presence on Facebook and Twitter, but Twitter, where we initiated the hashtag #histknow, was the most engaging. We used the platform not simply as a broadcast medium but as a social venue for interactions with scholars in different fields. A few of the resulting exchanges even led to new blog posts.

I am not linking to Twitter because of the problematic transformations it has undergone since late 2022. The account, @histknowledge, still existed last time I checked, albeit probably more for broadcast purposes. I wrote an appreciation of the old Twitter on this site when I left the platform: Bye Bye Birdie.

Migrant Knowledge

Cofounded in 2019 with Swen Steinberg and Andrea Westermann for the GHI Pacific Regional Office at UC Berkeley, Migrant Knowledge supports research done by scholars at the institute and in its research network.

My involvement in this blog grew out of the above project. The director wanted the profile of this new site to be substantially different, and I was well-placed to ensure that happened. My coeditors supplied the subject-matter expertise. My role on this site centered on the blog posts themselves, meaning developmental editing, line-editing, copyediting, and the review of image rights.

I also organized and (co)wrote copy for the various institutional and project pages, highlighting common threads among the GHI’s migration-related programs, the new Migrant Knowledge Network, and the blog itself. I completed this work against the background of preparation for an institute-wide evaluation that would determine whether the Pacific Office, as it is now called, would receive ongoing funding after its initial trial run. (The successful evaluation did not occur until after my tenure due to the pandemic.)

Knowledge and Scholarly Communication

Knowledge and Migration

Postscripts

  1. The blog links in our article have been broken by a move to a new platform without any long-term redirect strategy. Any links that begin historyofknowledge.net should now begin historyofknowledge.hypotheses.org. ↩︎