A Science Exhibit About Mental Health: Expectations and Engagement Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the last century and a half, scientific development has been breathtaking, but the understanding of this progress has dramatically changed.It is characterized by the transition from the culture of 'science' to the culture of 'research.'Science is certainty; research is uncertainty.Science is supposed to be cold, straight, and detached; research is warm, involving, and risky.Science puts an end to the vagaries of human disputes; research creates controversies.Science produces objectivity by escaping as much as possible from the shackles of ideology, passions, and emotions; research feeds on all of those to render objects of inquiry familiar (Latour 1998, 208-209).How did the transition from "science" to "research" described by sociologist and philosopher of science Bruno Latour materialise in the world of science museums and science exhibitions?This question lies at the heart of this paper.My aim is to examine the changing roles of science exhibitions from places of "cold" science, where secure, closed and fixed knowledge is communicated, to places that increasingly engage with "hot", controversial research and open debates.The examples discussed are European ones (from the United Kingdom, France and, above all, Austria) and I will be focussing on the display of controversies, rather than on displays that cause controversy.In the first part of the paper, I discuss how controversies have been studied in the field of science studies.In the second I examine the recent evolution of (some) museums from "cold" to "hot".Then, in the third part, I look at two recent exhibitions that dealt with the controversial nature of science.I will argue that while the "cold" way to exhibit science is through stabilised objects, the "hot" way works through relationality, that is, through highlighting the multiple relationships between visitors and objects, and between the positions of the various contenders in the controversy.The paper develops the concept of a "texture of controversy" in trying to make sense of exhibition arrangements focused on positions, relationships and processes, rather than stabilised products and objects.In displays about controversies we encounter an object that is open in many ways: to be flexibly interpreted, to be engaged with, to be questioned, to be challenged.Such an object materialises a number of symmetries: between various actors, between art and science, and between right and wrong.Two examples from the city of Vienna -the Gallery of Research and the true/wrong inc.exhibition -will shed some light on how controversial science can be exhibited. The study of controversies in science studiesOne way to make sense of the shift from cold science to hot research comes from the field of science studies (often interchangeably referred to as 'science, technology and society' or 'science and technology studies' or
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.035 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.032 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".