From There to Posterity: Modelling Diverse Itineraries of Scientific Instruments

It is reasonable to claim that there are few types of historical artefact more complex or consequent than the scientific instruments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In them are encoded generations of craft knowledge, while individually and in combination they enabled new vistas of knowledge production, real and figurative, through measurement, observation and experiment. Beyond the confines of the laboratory, these activities supported global navigation, expeditionary exploration and colonial surveying, often in support of imperial ambitions. One strand of the ‘Tools of Knowledge’ research project (introduced below) investigates some insights that may be derived from a mapping of the physical and conceptual itineraries of instruments that supported such activities, now held in public museum collections, as traces through the dataspace of a knowledge graph: a semantic representation of their contexts of creation, trade, use, and preservation.