"By the 1580s," Ogilvie writes, "the botanical tyro had to master
a tremendous number of words, things, and authorities." And during this
period botanical literature increasingly sought to address precisely
this concern. Already in the 1550s, with the work of Conrad Gesner and
Remert Dodoens, Ogilvie observes a shift from an older form of botanical
treatise, descended from the alphabetical materia medica, to a
new form organized around "tacit notions of similarity" among different
natural types. Not that all of these developments were useful. As
Ogilvie notes, the move toward similarity was not a direct move toward
scientific taxonomy, and in different works vastly different categorical
schemes applied, so that the same plant might be grouped with "shrubs"
in one and, in another, with "plants whose flowers please." Eventually,
with Caspar Bauhin at the end of the sixteenth century and John Ray at
the end of the seventeenth, Ogilvie notes the rise of a new class of
scientific literature aimed not only at describing and organizing natural
facts but at doing the same work for scientific texts themselves.
Corinna Lo on 14 Mar 09Scientists have therefore proved resourceful in using the web to further their research. They have, however, tended to lag when it comes to employing the latest web-based social-networking tools to open up scientific discourse and encourage more effective collaboration...... No one yet knows how to measure the impact of a blog post or the sharing of a good idea with another researcher in some collaborative web-based workspace. Dr Nielsen reckons that if similar measurements could be established for the impact of open commentary and open collaboration on the web, such commentary and collaboration would flourish, and science as a whole would benefit.
