Learning through Reconstruction: The Making and Knowing Project

Pamela H. Smith
Tuesday, July 31, 2018, 12:30 pm
In this lecture, historian of science Pamela H. Smith, the Seth Low Professor of History and Director of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University, in New York, discusses the reconstruction of historical recipes undertaken by the Making and Knowing Project.
Founded in 2014 by Smith, the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University explores the intersections between historical craft making and scientific knowledge. The current focus of the project is the translation of an anonymous late 16th-century French manuscript that gives unique insight into craft and artistic techniques, daily life in the 16th century, and the material and intellectual understanding of the natural world. The manuscript affords an invaluable view into the continuous and methodical experimentation through which art objects were created by skilled laborers, as well as the ways in which the process of artistic creation yielded insights into the use of natural materials.
In its quest to produce an open-access digital edition of this manuscript, the Project is hosting a series of expert crowd-sourcing workshops and courses that involve students, practitioners, scholars of the humanities and social sciences, natural scientists, and practitioner-scholars from the digital humanities. In a semester-long “laboratory seminar,” students conduct historical and laboratory research on the “recipes” contained within the manuscript in an attempt to understand the materials and processes that are described. The students engage in text- and object-based research as well as hands-on laboratory research on materials, and they then bring their research together in multimedia essays that form the historical and material commentary for the critical edition of the manuscript.
Pamela H. Smith is the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University and the founding Director of the Center for Science and Society and its cluster project, the Making and Knowing Project. Her articles and books examine craft and practice, and include The Body of the Artisan (2004), From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Recovering Skill and Art (under review), and the edited volumes The Matter of Art (2016) and Ways of Making and Knowing (2017). A forthcoming edited volume, Entangled Itineraries: Nodes of Material Convergence across Eurasia, deals with the movement of materials across Eurasia before 1800.
Presented in conjunction with the Summer Teachers Institute in Technical Art History at Yale.