About M&K

The Making and Knowing Project

The Making and Knowing Project, founded in 2014 by Pamela H. Smith and involving hundreds of collaborators, is a research and pedagogical initiative in the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University. The Project explores the intersections between historical craft making and scientific knowing. Drawing on techniques from both laboratory and archival research as well as studio practice and the digital humanities, the Making and Knowing Project aims to cross the science/humanities divide.

The creation of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition of BnF Ms. Fr. 640 has been the Project’s primary endeavor since 2014. This goal has shaped the Project’s methodology of fusing pedagogy with research, using a focused research object (Ms. Fr. 640) to teach historical, hands-on, and digital research methods while generating research outputs.

The digital critical edition Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France sheds light not only on what kind of knowledge the manuscript’s anonymous author-practitioner possessed about techniques and materials, but also, more broadly, how his work of making was related to knowing.

Indeed, the overarching theme of the Project and its work on Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France has been to show the ways in which making is an epistemic activity. In other words, making is itself a form of knowledge and not just an application of knowledge.

For more about the Project, explore the Project’s website (www.makingandknowing.org) and Making the Edition.

The Edition

Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France is a digital critical edition and English translation of the French manuscript Ms. Fr. 640 held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. This edition presents a rich and unique sixteenth-century technical text in French transcription and English translation for the first time, and situates its contents in their material and historical context.

The manuscript provides a view into the material, technical, and intellectual world of the late sixteenth century, and gives rare insight into techniques and processes for making art and daily life objects, as well as into how nature was used in art, collected, and appreciated in early modern Europe.

The Making and Knowing Project created Secrets of Craft and Nature through a series of collaborative courses, workshops, and conferences that involved students, craft practitioners, artists, scholars of the humanities and social sciences, natural and computer scientists, and scholar-practitioners from the digital humanities.

The Research and Teaching Companion

Once Secrets of Craft and Nature was completed, the Project turned to publishing the many research and teaching resources that were developed during the creation of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. The Project also created a suite of resources around using the digital edition. The Research and Teaching Companion contains resources—and we hope inspiration—for teachers, researchers, and makers who wish to integrate hands-on and digital components into their classes, research projects, and art practice. Its resources are intended to be used flexibly, and we invite you to freely adapt from it and create your own resources to fit your particular needs.

Like Secrets of Craft and Nature, the Companion was created through courses, workshops, and collaborative projects, as detailed below. See also, Credits, and (on the Project’s website) Collaborations.

Graduate Lab Seminar

Many of the teaching resources presented in the Companion originated as activities in the graduate Lab Seminar course, Craft and Science: Making Objects in the Early Modern World, taught between 2014 and 2018 at Columbia University. The graduate students in the course conducted text-, object-, and laboratory-based research that resulted in the edition’s approximately 130 essays which interpret, contextualize, and reconstruct the content of Ms. Fr. 640. The Companion contains Making and Knowing Syllabi for each of the eight versions of Craft and Science, focused each year on a different theme: Moldmaking and Metalworking; Colormaking (including dyes, pigments, artificial gems, coloring woods and metals, and varnish making); Practical Knowledge (including vernacular natural history, practical perspective, optics, mechanics, and medicine); Ephemeral Art; and Printmaking, Inscription, and Impression. We hope these syllabi will be a source of inspiration and provide a practical guide to the complexities of integrating seminar discussion and critical analysis with hands-on work in the laboratory or studio.

Skill Building

In teaching these semester-long Lab Seminars, we tried to balance about 8 weeks of hands-on skill building with 8 weeks of individual (or group) research and writing. During the weeks of skill building, we brought in for short periods “expert makers” (whose essays are also included in the edition, see Tutor or Student? and In Pursuit of Magic) whose practice focused around the year’s theme. Their essays reflect upon some of the ways we all learned together during these skill building sessions. As for the student essays, we gradually developed a form of writing by which we could combine argument-driven historical writing with descriptions of hands-on reconstruction of making processes. Throughout the semester, and particularly when conducting their own experiments, students’ hybrid lab/field notes were essential, and much time and effort went into recording and formatting these notes. The resulting essays, then, encapsulate much of the learning and many of the dynamics of the work of combining hands-on with critical analysis, which we hope will be useful to others in creating their own courses and research projects. For more information on this course, see Making the Edition of Ms. Fr. 640.

Undergraduate Hands-On History

With the edition complete, we transitioned in 2021 to a new course, Making and Knowing in Early Modern Europe: Hands-On History, in which a mixed cohort of undergraduate and graduate students explore Secrets of Craft and Nature to create Student Projects—involving all kinds of research—that extends the content of the edition in creative and sometimes surprising ways. The duration of the course period for this class is only about 2 hours/week (in contrast to the 4 hours of Craft and Science). Time and scheduling present a serious challenge to integrating hands-on work in the classroom, and it was out of this need to streamline the hands-on work that our step-by-step Lesson Plans for Hands-On emerged. As you can see in the Making & Knowing Syllabi, the hands-on sessions incorporate many of the skill building activities first formulated for Craft and Science. The Lesson Plans and associated teaching resources included in the Companion provide step-by-step guidance in planning, tools and ingredients, and the processes of the hands-on work. These Lesson Plans have been used by instructors from high school to graduate courses, and their experiences and advice can be found in M&K Resources in Use. Further reflections about teaching hands-on activities can be found in the Project’s Reflections on Hands-On.

Example Student Project from Hands-On History: A pop-up book of the manuscript

Digital Humanities

During development of the edition, we also taught digital humanities courses that integrated methods and tools of digital scholarship so that the students could help to build, test, and use the prototype of the edition. The syllabi for these courses provide information about minimal computing and the open access technologies that underlie the edition and our digital publication tool, EditionCrafter. Student projects resulting from these courses are included in this Companion in Digital Making and Knowing, and can also be found on the Project’s Sandbox, along with many additional digital projects using the data of the edition.

The Sandbox

While teaching digital humanities courses, the Project established the Making and Knowing Sandbox which makes available a number of resources that utilize and explore the data underlying Secrets of Craft and Nature. The Sandbox presents experimental, provisional, and in-progress work that engages and analyzes the data, topics, and content of Secrets of Craft and Nature and the manuscript BnF Ms. Fr. 640 as well as the larger themes explored by the Making and Knowing Project.

The Sandbox is an online environment for students, scholars, and others to explore and experiment with the Project’s data using a variety of digital tools, where others can add and create their own tools, case studies, and resources presented here. This is also a space for sharing teaching resources, exploring methods and processes across disciplines and levels of expertise, and engaging in knowledge exchange wherever possible. You can also explore the Sandbox’s Github repository.

EditionCrafter

The Making and Knowing Project created an open source and customizable publishing tool, EditionCrafter. It allows users to easily publish digital critical editions as feature-rich and sustainable static sites, based on the feature set and infrastructure of Secrets of Craft and Nature.

EditionCrafter was developed as a collaboration between the Making and Knowing Project and Performant Software Solutions to address the need for a scholarly publication tool that integrates primary sources, commentary, and textual analysis. As a publication tool, EditionCrafter facilitates the dissemination of original research through the creation of digital editions of texts. Researchers, students, and institutions such as libraries, historical societies, archives, and community groups can use the tool to grant public access to valuable textual sources across disciplines.

A platform for collaborative research and for pedagogy, EditionCrafter provides space for critical engagement with texts. Scholars and students alike can use digital tools to share not only data and finished products, but also documentation of the process of textual engagement and analysis.

Editions created with EditionCrafter are published through well-established technologies and workflows and can be maintained with minimal costs and resources, helping to address issues of sustainability and longevity.

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Contact

The Making and Knowing Project is a research cluster of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University in the City of New York.

For more information, please visit: https://www.makingandknowing.org/ and https://scienceandsociety.columbia.edu/

To report a bug or malfunction in any of the Project’s online publications, please send an email to info@makingandknowing.org with a detailed description or screenshot of the error message or section to be corrected. Alternatively, log any bugs by contributing to the Project’s Github by opening an issue in our issue trackers. Thank you!


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