Seminar
Preprint Culture. A Case in the Mediatization of Scientific Communication
- Phillip H. Roth
- Date
- Friday 28 February 2025
- Time
- Series
- CWTS Research Seminars
- Location
-
Willem Einthoven
Kolffpad 1
2333 BN Leiden - Room
- CWTS Common Rooms
Abstract
The contribution sheds some light on my ongoing research into a media history of preprints in particle physics. Preprints have served as an important means to rapidly inform members of the global physics community about the newest developments in the field. While personal contact was essential to keep afloat of rapid developments in physics until the 1940s, the casual sharing of lecture notes, unpublished reports, or copies of manuscripts through the mail or at gatherings had later gained considerable importance to compensate for the dispersion of the community. Although the format appears to circumvent established social institutions of academic publishing, preprint communication today constitutes a highly formalized practice, where papers are deposited on online repositories (esp. arXiv.org), which sorts and categorizes incoming contributions. My interest is in recounting this process of gradual formalisation, focusing especially on initiatives at the libraries of CERN, DESY, and SLAC to register, categorize, and make preprints accessible to the (local) research community, first manually and later in computerized form. In this context, I’m interested in exploring how the changes in the material and technological conditions of communication in physics have affected social roles, norms, and expectations as well as cultural understandings of actors as researchers (and authors). Conceptually, my project draws on the media-sociological approach of “mediatization”, which studies the institutionalised interdependencies of everyday (communication) practices with today’s media technologies and information infrastructures. I want to ask whether and how the introduction and change of media and information infrastructures to handle preprints interrelated with changes in social and cultural institutions of particle physics.