Commitment to Research for Human Flourishing

In March 2011 Japan suffered a catastrophe with a massive earthquake off its East coast. A chain of events led to the Fukushima nuclear power plan disaster with the release of massive amounts of toxic radiation. I visited Tokyo a few months later, in July, when the city's population seemed subdued and fearful in a similar way to how many people have been with the Covid-19 pandemic.

I was hosted by Professor Yukari Shirota at Gakushuin University. In response to what happened, Professor Shirota made an emphatic statement, which I paraphrase: “Japan does not have much in the way of natural resources, only human resources. I therefore commit my life to research.”

Research is fundamental to human resourcefulness and is an activity that I would like to develop more effectively. Whilst research is a natural aptitude and I’ve long nurtured an interdisciplinary approach, I have only a very limited publication record despite having spent decades in academia; to earn a living I have served mainly in a technical support capacity.  I originate ideas quite easily, some expressed on this blog, but I have found it exceedingly difficult to gain traction for them.

Reasoning that I needed to devote more time to my endeavours, in July 2020 I decided not to accept an offer a 12-month contract extension to my post as Digital Projects Officer at the History of Science Museum (HSM).  Instead, I would work full-time on my research activities. However, I shall retain a connection following the award by Museum of the (unpaid) position of Honorary Research Fellow, which was approved by the Board of Visitors at their meeting last November.

There are several strands to my research that might benefit HSM. The most immediate concerns any digital aspects, particularly online communications, an area I have explored for a while and about which I will touch on below. There are other, broader aspects. In 2024 the Museum will be celebrating the centenary of its founding and I’ve already outlined some visionary ideas. I may take the opportunity to expand on them.

A number of my research strands have concerned aspect of science and religion, a broad theme whose historical development took a major turn in the 17th century, the century in which the original Ashmolean Museum was founded. The building now houses HSM, but it is still formally referred to as the ‘Old Ashmolean’. This was a period that saw the rapid rise of rationality; indeed, we denote this period as the Age of Reason. The consequences have been far-reaching, most especially in the increasing emphasis on materiality, which has pervaded notions of science and research in general.

I talk briefly about that development in Buddhism and Computing, the first tangible fruit of my research. A contribution to the ‘Mud Pie Slices’ series, it offers more than a slice of my thoughts from the past decade on critical issues around computer-based technology, particularly as manifest on the Internet. It has been a considerable challenge to squeeze in a wide range of topics without undermining the overall flow, but the issues are urgent and I wish to facilitate better access to them.

Buddhism and Computing summarises and ties together some of the main strands of my ideas in response to challenges facing humanity, concerning the freedom to think and act autonomously, the quality of awareness and so on. I conceived the Sigala project in sustainable online social networking as the primary deliverable in response to these challenges, but until recently I kept my research notes in local documents. I have now set up a website for the main body of research, research.siga.la.

Thus far the part-time efforts of one person, it has large gaps, is rough around the edges, out of date in details, lacks marketing (Why so few images? Where’s the explainer video? Etc.), yet it seeks to offer a coherent and humane vision. I’m hoping that once word gets around, the thesis will gain acceptance and the presentation strengthen, and so on.

For me the process started in November 2007 when I started to reflect on what friendship truly means and how best to support it online. Initially, I conceived this in educational terms, but very quickly saw that its scope was universal.

Having been introduced to the Internet in the early ‘90s in the context of research, I have been strongly averse to the way the Internet, particularly the Web, has been commercialised.  Browsing the Web today with its numerous interruptions, whether for legal consents or advertising, do not make for an aesthetic experience.  Furthermore, changes in search indices and results generation, favours organisations, particularly corporates, and has diminished the voice of individuals; all told, it has generally become harder to find high quality and truly diverse materials.  

Nevertheless, we need viable economic models and I see great potential in applying the work of Avner Offer, who recognised a spectrum from the gift to the market in his theory of the 'economy of regard'.  I’d like to incorporate this in Sigala.

I will elaborate on the substance of the project in future blog posts. For now, I just mention in passing that the website is a kind of knowledge base, whose process is ongoing. As explained, I author and manage the content on my laptop at home using a locally installed WordPress, a web content management system whose popularity is due in no small part to the fact that it is open source software.

Using this setup has yielded the first technical fruit. Running to a few dozen pages, the site is not large or complex, but there is a lot of text, so it may take some while to browse to find something specific. So, as with most websites, a search facility is provided. However, I’ve taken an existing search plugin, WP Static Search, and modified it to work offline, i.e. without an Internet connection or web server. I’m only an occasional coder, but have uploaded my changes to Github and submitted a pull request. This means you can download the entire site onto a memory stick and browse and search it there. (Just one tip: when downloading the zip file from Github, the plugin folder should be renamed back to ‘wp-static-search’ before deployment.)

However the research proceeds, I shall always be looking for opportunities to innovate!

Universitas and communitas at university museums

Updated 5/1/2020: I've reverted most of this to draft status as I ponder further...

In recent decades the public-facing role of university museums has greatly increased. Expectations are for this to keep growing.  At the same time, as part of the university, they have certain obligations; they need to fulfil the purpose of such an institution and to respect the wishes of founders and donors.   So in this follow-up post to my vision for the History of Science Museum in Oxford, I wish to reflect on what role a university museum might have with respect to members of the public and systems of belief, and how it might continue to develop and flourish whilst being true to its roots.  As before, they’re just my personal views, not necessarily those of the Museum or the University.

The early stages of Oxford’s medieval formation were characterised by universitas, a Latin term used for a gathering or community of scholars in higher education, who were  training in holy orders, for the religious life.  The word is properly contextualised in the phrase, universitas magistrorum et scholarium, and connotes the whole, or entire.  This holistic approach to learning has been a core foundation sustaining the academic institution for some 800 years.

At the heart of its operation is communitas, another Latin word, which may be defined [from etymonline's entry for  'community'] as "community, society, fellowship, friendly intercourse; courtesy, condescension, affability," a deep sense of collegiality, a community in spirit, not just in form.  These general principles foster an ethos, which is more than any of the individual terms.  The word commonly used today is ’community’, but it tends to be materialised with reference to a particular group, where the inevitable question is, ”Which community?” followed by “What about that community?”...

Last Day at the Museum of the History of Science

Today was officially my last day as Web Officer at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, which has the distinction of being housed in the world’s oldest surviving purpose-built museum building, the Old Ashmolean, an early impression of which is as right.

I had the pleasure of working there since October 2009 with a close-knit group of dedicated, friendly and enthusiastic staff with a wide range of interesting backgrounds. So I was sad to leave and surprised how difficult it was to hand in my keys and especially the University card - I felt quite bereft as though I had lost part of my identity.

I found the Web Officer role similar in many ways to a previous one where I was responsible for anything Web-related; it requires some flexibility as the duties are varied, ranging from system administration (at the command line) and documentation through to some elements of graphic design, particularly image composition. In summary I would characterise much of the effort as consolidation - in terms of the Linux-based hosting provision, and the use of WordPress as the gateway to the entire online presence.

WordPress gets used mainly for blogging, albeit with resources built around it, but at MHS it is used as a content management system. Perhaps the most significant development was the integration of the KE EMu collections management system, for which I prepared the following slide for the 2011 KE EMu User group meeting, held at the Natural History Museum.

KE User Group 2011 showcase: WordPress integration

View more PowerPoint from Paul Trafford

A lot of the work was behind the scenes. A particular challenge was search engine optimisation (SEO); it took me a long time to realize that a WP upgrade had inserted canonical URLs into the header, leading to just a handful of collections pages being indexed. Once I had removed that and made the page titles more distinct the index grew and more visitors came.

Just occasionally I could do something a little different. For instance, when faced with slightly blurred image, I suddenly realized an opportunity to create an inverted reflection in time for the somewhat wacky and hugely successful Steampunk exhibition:


(I manually traced the figure; some regions have little contrast so I suspect an automated tool would probably struggle)

The old uniform is brought into the present, whilst the photographers (who strive to capture the present moment) recede into the background, into the past, by being faded to grey.

Now too my fleeting role as Web Officer will start to become a faded memory. However, I'm not leaving the museums world, as soon I shall start another role, supporting not one but many museums ...