Exploring Artisanal Foundations in Science and Industry

From Emergent Africa Fri Sep 19 2014, 18:22:00

We often overlook the role played by the artisanal/maker clusters across Africa.Is there something to learn from the work of MacArthur prizewinner Pamela O. Long? Her:

...prize-winning book, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (2001), presents groundbreaking analysis of the co-evolution of artisans as writers and technological openness as an ideal in scientific inquiry. Long illustrates the complex relationship between authorship and the ownership of intellectual property; the act of authorship simultaneously makes information public--at least to those with access to the text--and asserts the author's ownership of that information. Her second sole-authored book, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600 (2011), revisits a central issue in the history of science: the influence of artisans, [view whole blog post ]

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