The Representation of Science and Scientists on Postage Stamps: A science communication study

Chemistry in the mail: Stamps from around the globe and public science communication in the twentieth century

“…Second and in line with other scholarship in this area (e.g. Yardley, 2015), we found that representations of chemical operations across stamps are overwhelmingly depicted in terms of very particular and often unique instrumentation. Our analysis reveals that the specificity of the instruments featured functions to communicate that chemical operations are, first and foremost, relational in nature, and that the managing of relationships between and among mercurial materials, containers, human bodies, and the like is daedal.…”

“…Stamps as a medium for communicating about science has been considered in research by Yardley (2015), who—drawing primarily from a quantitative methodology to explore his personal collection of stamps—focused on assessing the likely intentions of postal authorities and scientists driving featured representations. Yardley’s findings echo several findings from other scholars who have delineated the specific types of science representations across diverse, twentieth-century mainstream media.…”

“…For instance, like Mitchell (2008) and Haynes (2003), Yardley reported that images of individual male scientists, working alone, were prominent, a phenomenon that Gigante (2018) argued characterizes science as exclusive and scientists as superior. Correspondingly, Yardley (2015) held that—across contexts of time and place—illustrations of instruments such as flasks and microscopes were used to symbolize the expertise and precision science requires, a finding also upheld by Jordanova (2000) who demonstrated that public portrayals of scientific practitioners in the twentieth century across media such as portraits, photographs, and stamps were more likely to include scientific instruments than were those of previous centuries and thereby portray the sciences as complicated and specialized. Yardley’s (2015) research aligns, as well, with that of Toumey (1996), who argued that mainstream stories about science tend to “convert abstract ideas into semi-abstract representations” such as E = mc 2 or, as Northcut (2006) noted, the double-helix model of DNA, which functions less to explicate the technical reasoning they represent and more to “humanize the scientific idea by casting it in a familiar representation” (Toumey, 1996: 125).…”

Potencial didáctico de la filatelia para estudiar Genética Mendeliana

“…Su estudio cronológico permite trazar los hitos y las personalidades importantes en todos los ámbitos del conocimiento. La ciencia no es ajena a ello y tanto científicos relevantes como logros científicos de importancia son temática recurrente en la emisión de piezas postales (Palmer, 1991;Yardley, 2015).…”

Constructing publics in museums’ science communication

“…The word “amateur” has its roots in Latin (amator–lover) and is here used for persons practicing an activity without having this as a livelihood (for a longer discussion see Hetland, 2011). While some scientists use the metaphor “stamp collections” to refer to certain amateur mapping strategies, those strategies may be as diverse as professional mapping strategies (Bowker, 2000; Hetland, 2011), and, not surprisingly, the same can be said of stamp-collecting strategies (Yardley, 2015). The relationship between verified knowledge, citizen science, and science is an important issue, not least because successful citizen engagement illustrates how citizens must learn the language and culture of a given science if they are to become competent (Epstein, 1996).…”