September 14, 2008

Science in the 21st Century reading list

I spent the past week at the Science in the 21st Century conference at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, ON. It was a heck of a conference, an intense five days of workshops, discussions and social events. I'm still digesting what went on and trying to make a bit of sense of it, especially how it all relates to libraries. However, I'm not quite up to the task of getting all that down on pixels yet. I thought I'd first start by arranging some of my "to be read" list that I gleaned from various of the discussions.

As you can imagine, lots of books, articles and web sites were mentioned at the conference, which is no surprise, of course. A lot of the web sites and articles that were mentioned are listed in the various FriendFeed threads in the Science21 room. A bunch of books were also mentioned in a thread that Mark Tovey started. I thought it would be interesting to take Mark's thread as well as some notes that I made during the conference and make a nice list here. (Thanks to everyone who contributed to Mark's thread!)

You could do a lot worse job of preparing for the present and future of science and scientific communication than reading these books:


  • The Dream Machine : J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

  • Libraries of the Future by J.C.R. Licklider

  • Rethinking Expertise by Harry Collins and Robert Evans

  • Gravity's Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves by Harry Collins

  • American Physics and the Cold War Bubble by David Kaiser

  • Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives edited by David Kaiser

  • The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union by Loren Graham

  • Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education by John L. Rudolph

  • The Sputnik Challenge by Robert A. Divine

  • Brainpower for the Cold War The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958 by Barbara Barksdale Clowse

  • Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics by Peter Louis Galison

  • QED and the Men Who Made It by Silvan S. Schweber

  • The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial Complex at MIT and Stanford by Stuart W. Leslie

  • Towards 2020 Science

  • Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild

  • Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

  • Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge

  • Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

  • The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers by Tom Standage

  • Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace edited by Mark Tovey

  • Anything by Lawrence Lessig

  • The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler

  • Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe

  • The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship by John Willinsky

  • Ambient Findabillity by Peter Morville

  • Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger

  • The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet by Daniel J. Solove

  • The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr

  • Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block

  • The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric S. Raymond

  • Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

  • The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups by Mancur Olson

  • Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

  • Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet by Christine L. Borgman

Of course, a similar list or lists could be compiled for articles, web sites, videos, etc, but I'll leave that task to some one else. Books lists seem to be more my thing.

In any case, feel free to suggest more books either here or in the FriendFeed thread, especially if there were items from the conference, the FriendFeed or the video that I've forgotten.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's probably worth mentioning that many of the points made in Lee Smolin's talk are in his book "The Trouble with Physics"

John Dupuis said...

Thanks, Matt. An obvious omission. I guess since Lee Smolin was actually at the conference I never felt the need to write down the title of his book!