Trevor Owens

@tjowens.bsky.social

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Chief Research Officer at the American Institute of Physics. Working on the history of science, libraries and archives, and social science research. Fan of bike rides, small dogs, and vegetarian cuisine.

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A thing I wrote is now out in the world: doi.org/10.1093/jahi... It is a short review essay of how historians and archivists have been using the web since the '90s (US perspective), to collect personal histories & eye witness accounts following current events & reflecting on the past

“Share Your Story”: Legacies of Online Collectingdoi.org In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, we as historians knew that we had witnessed a major set of events and that we would not be able to fully ass

“Nancy Grace Roman & Early Space Telescopes” is a great link rich tour of fascinating items in the Nancy Grace Roman papers. Particularly fun to see the picture of Roman exploring her own papers in the Niels Bohr Library & Archives reading room. www.aip.org/history-prog...

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A few days into writing a report on machine learning and cultural data for the Library of Congress, I came back with a question: "Can it be a comic?" Two years and many iterations later, here's "A Search for the Heart": libraryofcongress.github.io/a-search-for...

A Search for the Heart: Digital collections, machine learning and legacies of carelibraryofcongress.github.io Machine learning models are hungry for content from libraries and cultural insitutions. How can we imagine ways these technologies might help people and communities, while also being mindful of risks ...

Huge congrats to @willthomas-usa.bsky.social and everyone across teams at AIP involved in producing this great new issue of the AIP History Newsletter! You can read it online and subscribe to get future issues here -> www.aip.org/history-prog...

The Spring-Summer issue of the AIP History Newsletter is posted! The cover story, "Last Collider Standing" (by me), collates reflections on the cancellation of the Isabelle collider, the rise of the ill-fated Superconducting Super Collider, and the origins of RHIC... www.aip.org/sites/defaul...

“Digital Preservation and Artificial Intelligence - A Four Point Plan” great talk from William Kilbride of the Digital Preservation Coalition. www.dpconline.org/blog/dp-and-...

DP and Artificial Intelligence - A Four Point Plan - Digital Preservation Coalitionwww.dpconline.org artificial intelligence This paper gives an overview of the interaction between digital preservation and AI and provides a 4 point plan for future work

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Did you miss our Trimble event with NASA's John Mather and Mark Clampin last week? You can view it whenever you like on our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGte...

Lyne Starling Trimble Lecture Serieswww.youtube.com “The Next Great Space Telescope: Lessons for Success in the Search for Life Outside the Solar System” John Mather (NASA Goddard) and Mark Clampin (NASA HQ) June 5, 2024 5:45 p.m. EDT - Reception 6:30 p.m. EDT - Lecture American Center for Physics - DC 555 12th St. NW, Suite 250 Washington, DC 20004

Exciting to hear David Charbonneau and Sara Seager talking about their breakthroughs in studes of exoplanets and the attention that the The Kavli Prize will bring to further work on exoplanets. More info on the prize here -> www.kavliprize.org/exoplanets-b...

@shannonmattern.bsky.social was so great to catch up today! Very much looking forward to hosting you for a visit at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives some time in the spring.

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New at Nautilus: Bob Crease, "How Schrödinger’s Cat Got Famous" --I had no idea about LeGuin's role here

How Schrödinger’s Cat Got Famousnautil.us Fifty years ago, science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin popularized physics’ most enigmatic feline.

The AIP library & archives team shared a great display of items from the Nancy Grace Roman papers at the Trimble Lecture on Wednesday. I love being able to see these hand edits on a draft of her talk “An Astronomer’s Path to Space.” For more on her papers see-> history.aip.org/ead/20000089...

Was totally enthralled with John Mather and Mark Clampin’s conversation “The Next Great Space Telescope: Lessons for Success in the Search for Life Outside the Solar System” if you missed it, you can still catch the recording online. -> www.youtube.com/live/dGteWHn...

Great piece from Inside Higher Ed about the urgent need for research libraries to up their game in digital collecting as both an operational issue and a responsible collection development issue.

Librarians grapple with diverse archiving in a digital worldwww.insidehighered.com Librarians know more diversity is needed in archiving but it’s a work in progress.

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Got the treat of researching in our archive this week, and found a copy of Nancy Roman's 1959 AAS talk, "Planets of Other Suns" speculating on how to image exoplanets. This month, NASA unboxed the Roman Coronagraph Instrument, which will enable just that. #histsci www.nasa.gov/missions/rom...

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I believe Gleick also drew quite a bit from Charlie Weiner's multi-session oral history: www.aip.org/history-prog...

Richard Feynman - Session Iwww.aip.org Part I: The Early Years Weiner: This is a tape-recorded interview with Professor Richard Feynman, in his home in Altadena, California, on March 4, 1966. Charles Weiner will occasionally interrupt with...

Finished reading James Gleick’s book Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman last night. It’s a great read! Thrilled to flip to the back of the book and see how critical the American Institute of Physics collections were to telling this story.

Great exploration of two rare copies of works from Roger Bacon in AIP’s collection. As Elly Truitt explained at our recent Trimble lecture, the publishing history of these works is illustrative of changing ideas about Bacon’s legacy and impact over time.

Roger Bacon's Opticswww.aip.org In this blog post, we give you a behind-the-scenes look at two unique, centuries-old volumes of Roger Bacon's Opus Majus and works on optics from our rare book collection, which were recently featured...

New report from Pew finds 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later. This research underscores how critical web archiving efforts are. www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...

When Online Content Disappearswww.pewresearch.org A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible.

Nice overview of the recent International Internet Preservation Consortium’s Web Archiving Conference from Friedel Geeraert, of the Royal Library of Belgium. Great to see continued progress on international web archiving collaborations. netpreserveblog.wordpress.com/2024/05/08/r...

Reflections on the 2024 IIPC General Assembly and Web Archiving Conferencenetpreserveblog.wordpress.com By Friedel Geeraert, Expert in web archiving at KBR | Royal Library of Belgium This year’s IIPC General Assembly and Web Archiving Conference took place at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) i...

My fourth book, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory is now out from University of Michigan Press. If you are curious about it, you can check out this Q&A I did with the press press.umich.edu/Blog/2024/05...

Q&A with After Disruption Author Trevor Owenspress.umich.edu

Huge unique opportunity for an archivist to join our growing @aip.bsky.social research team! americaninstituteofphysics.applicantstack.com/x/detail/a2b...

American Institute of Physics - Archivistamericaninstituteofphysics.applicantstack.com American Institute of Physics

Fascinating new article in Memory, Mind & Media on how smart phone apps churning out algorithmic memories to us based on our personal photos are changing our lived experience of the present -> dx.doi.org/10.1017/mem....

Algorithmically generated memories: automated remembrance through appropriated perception | Memory, Mind & Media | Cambridge Coredx.doi.org Algorithmically generated memories: automated remembrance through appropriated perception - Volume 3

The Open Data Use Case Observatory report nicely documents examples of how and where open data is being leveraged to make an impact data.europa.eu/en/news-even...

Unveiling the impact of open data: Insights from the Use Case Observatory | data.europa.eudata.europa.eu The Use Case Observatory, an initiative led by data.europa.eu, serves as comprehensive research aimed at evaluating the impact of open data across Europe between 2022 and 2025.

Great history of science event in DC on May 8th. Hope to see you there!

DC-area #histsci friends, on May 8 we welcome Prof. Elly Truitt (Penn) to AIP's new downtown space to present our first Trimble Lecture of 2024: "A Thirteenth-Century Perspective on Optical Science and Experiment: The Case of Roger Bacon” RSVP here: www.aip.org/history-prog...

“That’s Not Physics” from Andrew Zangwill is a great concise historical overview how and when various areas of research were defined in and out of physics. I recommend it to anyone interested in how the boundaries between professional/research domains develop and evolve over time.

Opinion: That’s Not Physicsaps.org Where do the boundaries of physics begin and end? The debate has persisted for more than a century.

Excited to see this line of thinking from St John Karp. We still have a long way to go in rethinking relationships, context, and discovery in born digital collections and this seems promising. “The Shape of Information: A New Approach to Digital Collections” saaers.wordpress.com/2024/04/10/t...

The Shape of Information: A New Approach to Digital Collectionssaaers.wordpress.com By: St John Karp At the BitCurator Forum this year I presented a talk called “The Interconnectedness of All Things.” I discussed the potential use for a new tool in the digital archivist’s toolkit, so...

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AIP is hiring a historian to work in the DC area! We have been documenting the history of the physical sciences for 60 years and our new historian will collaborate with me in building the future of these #histsci activities. Apply here: americaninstituteofphysics.applicantstack.com/x/detail/a2b...

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Holden Thorp's Science editorial on science pedagogy, #HPS #histsci, and realistic perceptions of scientific method arrives almost exactly 50 years after Stephen Brush's famous Science article on the same subject, "Should the History of Science Be Rated X?" doi.org/10.1126/scie...

The scientific enterprise continues to be questioned when ideas are revised in light of new data. To most scientists, this is such a natural part of science that we take it for granted. We (includes me) need to do a better job of saying "this is what we know now." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Teach philosophy of sciencewww.science.org Much is being made about the erosion of public trust in science. Surveys show a modest decline in the United States from a very high level of trust, but that is seen for other institutions as well. Wh...

Huge job opportunity for a Historian working with @williamthomas.bsky.social as part of our AIP Research team. Please share with anyone passionate about the role history can play in supporting positive change in the physical sciences. americaninstituteofphysics.applicantstack.com/x/detail/a2b...

American Institute of Physics - Historianamericaninstituteofphysics.applicantstack.com American Institute of Physics

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Excited to have a short article out in AHR. Co-written with Avery Blankenship, "Word Embedding Models & the Hybridity of Newspaper Genres" argues that semantic contextual models "can reflect the fluidity of 19th-century writing & readers more clearly than many…taxonomies" doi.org/10.1093/ahr/...

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Checking google scholar for recent articles with the phrase "certainly, here is a":

As you may recall from the other day, it is essential to the future of the university that academics fully and unquestioningly incorporate LLMs into their teaching and research practice