Scott Billings – Inside HSM Oxford

Christmas has come early for MHS!

Scott Billings — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 10:24:31 +0000

We have written before about the different ways that new items come into the Museum’s permanent collection – through auctions, donations and other routes. An important source of new material is that given by private donors, and the Museum has been fortunate to receive two recent donations in this way. A medieval European astrolabe, pictured above and to ... [Read more...]

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Capturing the invisible

Scott Billings — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 10:36:11 +0000

This weekend sees the international launch of this year’s Big Draw, an initiative to encourage people of all ages to draw. It’s happening across Oxford on Saturday 19 September, and we are getting involved with a rather unusual take on drawing… For our X-Ray Line event we are interested not in the things that are easily seen ... [Read more...]

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A day in the life…

Scott Billings — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 09:42:07 +0000

We may be a small museum, but we get up to lots of different things… If you’ve ever wondered what happens here in a typical day, then take a look at this short film. Thanks to Tom Wilkinson and Tom Fuller in the University of Oxford Public Affairs Directorate for putting this together.

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Creating and curating a special exhibition

Scott Billings — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 11:03:07 +0000

Our current special exhibition, ‘Dear Harry…’ – Henry Moseley: A Scientist Lost to War, features many artefacts drawn from the collections of museums and archives around the country. Its stories and narrative attempt to convey something of the voice and character of Moseley himself; and some of the scientific experiments he conducted are revealed through computer animation. Although ... [Read more...]

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Death at The Farm – (Re-)visiting Harry on Gallipoli

Scott Billings — Mon, 08 Jun 2015 11:46:39 +0000

Our current special exhibition, ‘Dear Harry…‘, presents an intimate portrait of Henry Moseley, a brilliant British physicist who was killed, aged 27, in World War I in Gallipoli, Turkey on 10 August 1915. To mark the exhibition and the centenary of the Dardanelles campaign, our director Dr Silke Ackermann embarked on a pilgrimage to Gallipoli and retraced ... [Read more...]

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Building time machines

Scott Billings — Thu, 28 May 2015 14:57:54 +0000

The Museum is famous for its collection of astrolabes, the largest and most significant in the world and particularly strong in Islamic instruments. An astrolabe is a brilliant astronomical device used, very roughly speaking, for timekeeping. But as researcher Taha Yasin Arslan explains, timekeeping in the medieval Muslim world involved many different things… by Taha Yasin ... [Read more...]

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Too valuable to die?

Scott Billings — Tue, 26 May 2015 11:51:53 +0000

Our latest special exhibition, ‘Dear Harry…’ – Henry Moseley: A Scientist Lost to War, is now open and we are pleased to say that people are taking an enthusiastic interest in Moseley’s important story. The exhibition is part biography, part World War I centenary, and part history of science. It presents Harry Moseley intimately as ... [Read more...]

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For the Love of It

Scott Billings — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 08:44:17 +0000

28 April – 2 August 2015 By Robyn Haggard Do you have any particularly fond memories of science or scientific objects? It turns out that when we put our minds to it we can often recall many. For the last couple of months we have been collecting memories for our small exhibition, For the Love of It. ... [Read more...]

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Making the Dreams of Homunculi

Scott Billings — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 12:47:02 +0000

By Vid Simoniti When Charles Ogilvie and I were tasked with making this video work to coincide with the Alchemy and the Laboratory exhibit, we took the painting below as a starting point. It shows a bearded scholar, who directs four putti in his laboratory. Paintings of the genre often satirized the alchemist, but what stands out ... [Read more...]

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The Mahler Project

Scott Billings — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 13:50:27 +0000

By Scott Billings Regular readers of Inside MHS Oxford may recall our article about the fulfillment of a 30-year ambition by Matt Westcott: to coordinate an orchestra of ZX Spectrums to perform an excerpt from Mahler’s 1st Symphony. This historic event came off the back of our Geek is Good special exhibition in 2014*, which featured ... [Read more...]

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