From Citizen Science to Citizen Humanities – 19th Century history in the digital age — University of Leicester

The questions of how, by whom and where science was done in the Victorian period – the century which brought us ‘modern’ science – is never going to offer straightforward answers. Science, and scientific authority was produced and reproduced everywhere – the lab, the home, the field, and institutions big and small. It was recorded in notebooks, developed on photographic plates, and published in letters, books and newspapers. With a widespread culture of collecting, experimentation, and observation – mediated through sources such as the 19^th century periodical – who counted as a scientist in the Victorian period was up for grabs.

These are the questions that historians working in the English departments here at Leicester and Oxford University – and partnered with the Natural History Museum, Royal College of Surgeons and Royal Society on the AHRC funded project Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19^th and 21^st Centuries (ConSciCom) are trying to address. In order to think about who exactly could do Victorian science – and what the boundaries of their participation were – we are looking at the single most important site of production and reproduction of debate, observation and experimentation in the period: the scientific periodical.