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Next week, @SciAm celebrates its 175 anniversary. Its demisemiseptcentennial, if you will. [A thread] #SciAm175
Longtime followers may know that I love nearly any excuse to dive down @SciAm archive rabbit holes. (Doing the research for this 2016 @eyeofestival talk was a blast —> https://vimeo.com/176869834 )
In the fall of 2019, I started warming up for the celebrations, and collaborated with @rougeux on this cover color analysis page. #SciAm175 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientific-americans-colorful-covers-reveal-175-years-of-change/
My favorite part? Pouring over the original covers with a lupe and asking Silvia DeSantis (prepress & quality manager) and Dan Schlenoff (copy editor & resident archive expert) a bazillion questions about early printing technology and @SciAm’s history.
I was looking forward to spending more quality time this spring flipping through the bound copies stored on shelves along several walls of the @SciAm office in NYC.
Well, we all know what hit NYC in early spring. And demisemiseptcentennial thoughts quickly gave way to more pressing things: adjusting to living and working in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic while covering it for the magazine…
…and coming to terms with bleak situations in the U.S. on so many fronts.
Print deadlines aren’t very forgiving, so eventually I had to actively carve out time for anniversary-related content again. And I have to tell you, it was a treat. Thanks in large part to data designer @moritz_stefaner.
. @moritz_stefaner analyzed and visualized 175 years of words in Scientific American. As in all 110,292,327 words, printed across 5,107 issues of @SciAm magazine from August 1845 through August 2020. #SciAm175 #ScienceWords
The end product, with graphics by @moritz_stefaner and @laessr, and an introductory essay by science historian Lorraine Daston, is wonderfully poetic: visuals about words and words about visuals. #SciAm175 #ScienceWords https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-language-of-science/
Don’t miss the companion article by @moritz_stefaner, in which he describes his methodology. #SciAm175 #ScienceWords https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-turn-175-years-of-words-in-scientific-american-into-an-image/
Then—here comes the fun part!—dive in and explore the database of words for yourself. Share screenshots of your custom word searches and word frequency pattern discoveries with the hashtags #SciAm175 #ScienceWords.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/explore-175-years-of-words-in-scientific-american/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/explore-175-years-of-words-in-scientific-american/
My favorite @SciAm word frequency pairing? Hands down—> certainty/uncertainty. #SciAm175 #ScienceWords
