MHS News

Unlocking the Brain

BAW

Next week is international Brain Awareness Week and we couldn’t let this pass without some hands-on brain investigation in the Museum. Like last year, we have teamed up with University of Oxford neuroscientists to bring you five days of family friendly activities, games and interactive experiments.

Researchers from the University will be presenting a series of interactive demonstrations suitable for everyone aged six and over. Visualize your own speech sounds, and learn how our ears and brains process them. See how functional imaging provides a window into the working of the brain; and have a go at using your brainwaves to move an object! This and much more to test, intrigue and indeed unlock the secrets of your brain.

Unlocking the Brain is running daily, 12-5pm, from Tuesday 11 to Friday 14 March, and again on Sunday 16 March, 2-5pm (on Saturday we have the exciting Crystals Day too).

Left and right brain: myths and reality
On Thursday 13 March at 7pm, Professor Dorothy Bishop from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford will present a free lecture at the Museum looking at the role of the brain’s two hemispheres.

It’s common to hear claims that you can “train the right side of your brain” or that the left side of the brain is analytic and the right side intuitive. But how do scientists study the function of the two sides of the brain to test such claims, and do people vary in how the two sides of the brain are organised? If so, does it matter? Come along to find out…

Geek is Good

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Geek specs

Geek is Good – Special exhibition

Opening 15 May 2014

Tonight we are publicly launching plans for our next special exhibition, Geek is Good, at the Oxford Geek Night at the Jericho Tavern. At the event we have been gifted just 60 seconds to make a pitch for involvement in the exhibition, so here’s a bit more information about what we’re planning.

Geek is Good will take a reverse chronological look at a few of the devices, gadgets, instruments and widgets that may have been the must-have geek gadget of their day. Who made them? Who bought them? And what exactly did they do?

Today, the idea of nerdy-geekery is pretty cool, and that’s where we’ll start, but it hasn’t always been that way. We’ll chart a few areas of geeky interest, from early home computing in the 1980s, to ham radio, calculating machines, amateur astronomy and the sundials and astronomical compendia of the Renaissance and beyond.

There will also be an accompanying programme of public events and we are now interested in hearing from anybody who might want to collaborate on a relevant event, to be hosted at the Museum sometime between 15 May and late September. We’re also looking for potential lenders of material – 1970s calculators or giant classroom slide rules anyone? – as well as a possible project partner to develop an interactive game for the gallery.

If you’re interested or have any questions contact me at scott.billings@mhs.ox.ac.uk, follow us @MHSOxford and watch out for #geekisgood on Twitter.

Making Prints Public project update… over 1200 items catalogued!

The Broad Looking West, etching by W. Monk, Oxford, 1904

Joseph Priestley, engraved by W. Bromley, London, 1797

The researcher-cataloguer team at MHS have now finished cataloguing the prints collection, thanks to funding from the Arts Council England under the Designation Development Fund. We are now putting together an exhibition for the museum for early 2014.

We’ve been excited and amused by much of what we’ve uncovered while cataloguing over 1200 prints in the collection. It includes a range of popular techniques for making prints from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, including woodcuts, different styles of engravings, made using copper and steel, in line and stipple treatments, lithographs, and methods of hand and machine colouring using inks and watercolours.

William Harvey, engraved by by J. Houbraken after Bemmel, London, 1739

The prints collection was physically curated by our archivist, Tony Simcock, into subject-based folders over the years. Themes included astronomy, architecture, aeronautics, medicine, chemistry, pharmacy. You can see from looking in each folder how subjects have been depicted and treated in illustration over time, such as the depictions of laboratories from satires of an alchemist’s lab to a modern chemistry lab.

John Evans, engraved by Godfrey after Bulfinch, London, 1776

Within the prints collection, there is a special collection of portraits of scientists. Many of these are engravings, mainly in line and stipple, created after older portraits and likenesses. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits of natural philosophers, astronomers, astrologers, antiquaries, surgeons, botanists and alchemists are often line engraved and represented in cartouches or as busts surrounded by representations of their subject (such as William Harvey Inv. No. 14459). Some of these include allegorical imagery, as the example of Joseph Priestley shows (Inv. No. 97347).

Some of the likenesses are less flattering: for example John Evans (Inv. No. 33472), a seventeenth-century astrologer who was as famous for his debauched lifestyle as he was for his skills in mathematics, and can be seen here in an early nineteenth century stipple engraving.

Before the exhibition we will sharing interesting items on Twitter – do take a look via the new @MHSCollections account!