This paper explores the potential offered by a cinematographic approach to the study of museums, particularly science centres. By setting up an intermedial lens that maps between the museum medium and film – particularly the visitor experiences in museums onto a specific genre of museum film – correspondences between these media and their respective ‘grammars’ are analysed. After a brief overview of the relationship between museums and film in the twentieth century, a language of documentary film suitable for museum film is introduced based on the film theory of Jon Boorstin, who also directed a film on the Exploratorium in San Fancisco, which adapted post-war insights in communication design as developed by the Eames Office. Reviewing five documentaries about the Exploratorium shows that only Boorstin’s museum film could adequately convey the museum experience to others, thus going beyond intermediality to enable a transmedial transfer. How this film emerged through the cooperation of the Exploratorium with the Eames Office and national funding agencies is presented in some detail in order to show that the intermedial lens can work both ways, allowing for the transmedial application of film analysis to the museums themselves.

This paper explores the complex role penicillin played in the relations between Britain, the USA and the USSR between the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War through the lens of science diplomacy and the category of negotiation. In the post-war years the Soviets tried to acquire know-how on large-scale penicillin production from Britain and the USA. While the USA refused to collaborate, the British strategy was more complex. The British government allowed the Oxford team, which had discovered the antibacterial properties of penicillin, to disclose all the technology and know-how concerning large-scale penicillin production of which they were aware to the Soviets, while simultaneously trying to slow down penicillin research and production in the Soviet Union by controlling the export of certain industrial machinery, Podbielniak extractors, to Eastern Europe. By contrast, the USA put a stop to scientific and technological collaboration with the Soviets, but were less strict about the export of industrial machinery. The different strategies generated tensions between Britain and the USA, and ultimately mirrored both the British fear of an American disengagement from Europe and the American will to protect the interests of their national industry.

For more than 2,000 years, counting rods were the main tool used in Chinese mathematics. However, direct evidence for their use is lacking. The current evidence is primarily derived from two sources: procedural texts in ancient mathematical writings and counting diagrams drawn with rod signs in thirteenth-century writings. This study analyzes the procedural texts in two ancient Chinese mathematical books: 1) The Nine Chapters on Mathematical Procedures, completed by approximately 100 BCE or 100 CE, and 2) the Mathematical Canon by Master Sun, completed by approximately 400 CE. This article argues that the differences between the texts insufficiently explain the fundamental differences in the operations that could be performed with mathematical rods. Further, by examining two mathematical books from the thirteenth century, namely the Mathematical Book in Nine Chapters written by Qin Jiushao in 1247 and Fast Methods on Various Categories of Multiplication and Division of Areas of Fields written by Yang Hui in 1275, this article argues that the relationships between counting diagrams and their accompanying text vary depending on the author, thereby highlighting authors’ different epistemological perspectives. Examining the historical context is essential for understanding the relationship between procedural texts and material operations and for developing new methods to investigate the use of counting rods.

This article examines the intellectual and interventionist trajectory of American popular writer and commentator Robert Reich from his early 1980s advocacy of “industrial policy” to his time as US Secretary of Labor in the 1990s. It argues that Reich is an interesting figure to consider through the lens of “interventionist knowledges” because, although he draws selectively on social scientific data and knowledge, his syntheses of these things are more rooted in mythic thinking than in disciplined analysis. This article recounts the history of a failed bill, the Reemployment Act of 1994, to examine how Reich and those around him drew on and interpreted existing social scientific data to construct an idea of “the New Economy” and what, they claimed, it meant for national human capital policy. This article suggests that mythic visions of society and economy possibly play a large role in policy-making and issues advocacy.

This article investigates how anthropological knowledge about regions with economic difficulties became part of regional development in France during the pivotal decade of the 1970s. It argues that ethnological fieldwork in French peripheries in the 1960s provided knowledge about regional culture and practices for its maintenance that became the core of a new development tool, the Ecomusée. It was via this tool that French anthropologists sought to intervene in regional development. By analyzing one of the first French ecomuseums, we gain an understanding of how anthropological practices and knowledge nurtured the shift to cultural development politics associated with the “enrichment economy.” Fieldwork in the 1960s, aimed at a professionalized Ethnologie de France, problematized interaction with the local population and produced knowledge about regional culture that identified a region with its economic past. The practices of documentation and participation established during these fieldwork projects shaped the enrichment economy.

The paper examines BBC television programmes that feature museum spaces of science and technology, contextualizing the development of this programme type in the 1950s and 1960s with science (and history-of-science) broadcasting. In 1971, the BBC televised a ten-part series devoted to UK science and technology museums. Within These Four Walls, the central case study, featured episodes filmed at the Natural History Museum, the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Institution and the Science Museum, among others; its televisual tour guides included prominent science broadcasters – Patrick Moore, George Porter and Eric Laithwaite – as well as curators and scholars of the history of science, such as Joseph Needham. The paper explores, using intermediality as an analytical category, how the museological conventions of curated gallery displays and tours have been adapted and transposed to television. In doing so, it reflects on the historiographies that emerge from this intermedial product (a series of televised museum tours), arguing that they should be interpreted in the cultural context of the early 1970s. It concludes that the presentation of historical authenticity through intermedial constructions of place, objects and performances conferred what Thomas Gieryn has dubbed ‘truth spots’ on history-of-science narratives for audiences.