Wellcome to Sabers en acció (Knowledge(s) in Action), your online multi-linguistic textbook on the history of science, technology and medicine. Knowledge(s) in Action is new journey through the history of science, technology and medicine based on the latest perspectives and research findings. New and often surprising stories will be presented through critical descriptions of new characters, spaces and objects. Those who accompany us on this journey will tread untamed territory, meet almost invisible characters, and discover tools to question many widely held images of science, technology and medicine. They will therefore have to accept the revision of many assertions that are sometimes assumed without historical foundation. We will see, for example, that there were relevant advances during the so-called ‘dark ages’, that the ‘scientific revolution’ is a Eurocentric myth, often at the service of narratives of domination, and that some famous people in current science books were rather interested in theology, magic or alchemy. Through Knowledge(s) in Action, the plurality of ways of knowing and their changing interactions will be explored. Heroic images, foundational myths, the role of geniuses, eureka moments and pivotal experiments will be critically reviewed and their associate narratives deconstructed. The diachronic journey shows that science is a collective enterprise in which many people have participated, many of them invisible or marginalised within traditional narratives. We will also recover the memory of many forgotten spaces in today’s science textbooks and learn to read images, objects, models, formulae and diagrams with a historical perspective. We will also review the profound relationships between science, technology and medicine with the different societies and cultures in which they develop, as well as the changing interactions between all their ingredients.
Knowledge(s) in Action is a digital humanities project of the López Piñero Inter-University Institute for Science Studies (Institut Interuniversitari López Piñero) and the Catalan Society for the History of Science and Technology (Societat Catalana d’Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica). Research and teaching staff from these centres, as well as from other academic institutions, participate. Its contents are protected by a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Derivative Works 4.0 International license.
