Reinscribing Al-Andalus and its sciences: Transnationalism in service to a regionalized Arab–Islamic scientific legacy at Granada's <i>Parque de las Ciencias</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Science Park ( Parque de las Ciencias ) in Granada, Spain, has been host to various exhibitions of differing sizes—ranging from small exhibits to an entire pavilion—about the history of Arab–Islamic science, with a particular focus on the scientific thought and its development in Al-Andalus (or medieval ‘Muslim Spain’). This transnational scientific legacy is not often featured in science museum content around the world, despite its foundational role in the development of European sciences. For example, the Pavilion of Al-Andalus and Science, which was open from 2008 to 2016, allowed for a clear analysis of not only the universalist discourse of the sciences but also the transnational, supranational, regional and localized representations of scientific knowledge, paradigms and processes. To explore the distinctions between these framings, I review the organizational objectives of the pavilion's creator, the Fundación El Legado Andalusí , and the content of the Museum of Al-Andalus and the Sciences located on the second floor of the pavilion. The analysis focuses on several key aspects: the balance between the number of Andalusi scholars and the other Arab thinkers mentioned; the references to multiple geopolitical frames; the ways in which Andalusi scientific knowledge and contributions are interwoven into the wider Arab–Islamic history of science; and the centring of local and regional knowledge, practices, styles and techniques. The conclusions of the study are two-fold: (1) a transnational history of science can (a) reinforce a universalist discourse of science, while simultaneously (b) engaging a framework in which this scientific content and legacy can be localized; and (2) scientific knowledge and practice, like science communication, are invariably affected by other dominant forces when social, cultural and political factors beyond the realm of science are involved in the production and representation of science.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".