Speaker:

Christopher Donohue Ph.D., Historian of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health

Title:

Tacit Knowledge and the Limits of Our Tools: Lessons from a Fully Digital Archive

Talk Abstract:

The History of Genomics Program, founded by Eric Green, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in 2012, and managed by Christopher Donohue and Kris Wetterstrand, seeks to preserve the history of genomics and the Human Genome Project and promote scholarly research in the history, philosophy and sociology of genomic science. The archive (as of 2019) is close to twenty million pages of saved material and is totally digital, enabling remote access and efficient searches but posing unique problems: How to such a huge amount of data which is homogeneous and has a great deal of conceptual repetition and overlap? How do you interpret nearly identical search results for researchers? How is research in the archive done when the resource is almost nearly always available because it is online? The key to all of these questions is "tacit knowledge" or a "feeling for the digital organism." Like research generally, archival queries and archival questions, rather than simply exploratory fieldwork, need to be defined by ever-more precise questioning which is defined by intimate knowledge of the dataset on the part of researchers, as well as archivists working in dynamic to address those questions.

Speaker Bio:

Christopher Donohue Ph.D. is Historian of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda Maryland. He is also the founder of their institutional archive (which now contains over 25 million pages of documents) and also serves as co-manager of the History of Genomics Program. The goal of this program is to promote the history and philosophy of contemporary biology and genomics at the National Human Genome Research Institute. In this capacity, he has conducted over sixty oral history interviews of leading biologists, while also leading the planning for two international conferences per year (since 2015) on the history and philosophy of contemporary science. He also directs a three times yearly seminar series. He is the editor most recently of a special issue in "History of Genomics and the Human Genome Project" published by the Journal of the History of Biology in 2018. He is also the editor of a special issue on the uses and appropriations of biological and genetic evidence by the social sciences, in press, from Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biology and the Biomedical Sciences. He has given, since 2012, over forty conference presentations and lectures, having been frequently invited by the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, as well as universities in England, France, Scotland, Greece, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Israel, Hungary, Belgium, Poland and the United States. He is the associate editor of the Ideology and Politics Journal which focuses on the political philosophy of post-Soviet and post-communist states. He serves on the editorial board of Carnet Zilsel , one of the leading (if relatively new) French journals in the history and sociology of science. He also has served as a referee of several journals (including history and anthropology) as well as a few popular presses. He is currently at work on a history of the Human Genome Reference Consortium and is finishing his monograph on the history of human variation programs funded by the NHGRI, from the HapMap to 1000 Genomes.

Related Info