Tools of Knowledge: Modelling the Creative Communities of the Scientific Instrument Trade, 1550-1914

Scientific knowledge has helped shape the modern world. It has responded to and facilitated global exploration and commerce, the industrial revolution and medical understanding. While popular narratives celebrate famous discoveries and scientists, they usually overlook the makers of the technologies on which they relied.

Scientific instruments embodied current knowledge and practice, both enabling and constraining our understanding of the world. It is the stories of these artefacts, and of the men and women involved in the trade that produced them, during three and a half centuries, that the 'Tools of Knowledge' project will recover and share.

'Tools of Knowledge' will assemble a large volume of diverse data to which it will apply cutting-edge methods of digital analysis. The research will be grounded in the existing Scientific Instrument Makers, Observations and Notes (SIMON) dataset, comprising more than 10,000 records on individual instrument makers and firms from Great Britain and Ireland.

To this will be added data from existing legacy databases, collections catalogues and new metallurgical research, as well as material newly extracted from historical texts or generated using advanced digital methods. The aggregated data will be remodelled using semantic knowledge representation, to encode expert understanding of the meaning of this data in a machine-readable form and enable linking across datasets.

For the first time, information about people, places, practices, institutions, materials and objects will be accessible for study in combination and at scale. Textual and graphical interfaces, designed to allow the construction of complex and nuanced queries, will allow researchers to dynamically form and test new hypotheses about the relationship between different factors in the lives of the instruments themselves, and the development of the trade.

The research enabled by 'Tools of Knowledge' extends across historical periods and spatial scales, to explore how individuals and companies structured their activities, and how urban space and national infrastructure influenced the instrument trade. It is organised around seven Case Studies, tackled by four Co-Is and three researchers. The questions to be investigated stretch back to the manufacture of instruments in the mid-16th century: the sources of raw materials, their trade, and who gained commercial advantage from novel methods of working them.

They extend forward through the 18th and 19th centuries to address the geography of the instrument trade (urban, national, global), and the interplay of expertise, company organization, and industrial development. They also encompass how different kinds of instruments - variously used for teaching, experimentation, discovery and regulation - circulated, the impact of their distribution on other industries, and how the trade was perceived by the public at large.

A rich panoramic view of a creative and commercial community will emerge, at once broad and detailed, revealing new subjects and compelling stories, and raising public awareness of the complex relationship between the practical, intellectual and commercial activities that underpin the technology of the world we inhabit.

Under the leadership of Prof Liba Taub, Director of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, this thirty-month project assembles an interdisciplinary team from the Universities of Cambridge (Dr Boris Jardine, Dr Joshua Nall), Sussex (Dr Alex Butterworth) and Kent (Dr Rebekah Higgitt) with extensive expertise in the history of science, museum curation, digital methods and visualisation design. The project is in partnership with the Science Museum, London, and Royal Museums, Greenwich, holder of the core SIMON database.

Using 'triplestore' database technology from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 'Tools of Knowledge' will deliver a persuasive example of Linked Data generating transformative research in a tightly defined field.