Things and the archives of recent sciences

• Understanding science as practice challenges established notions of what constitutes a scientific archive.
• In the history of science there is a renewed attention to things.
• Many of the challenges of working with material artefacts are institutional.
• Digitalisation can help overcome the institutional separation of paper records and object collections.

With the interest in studying science as practice came an interest in the material artefacts and things that form part of scientific activities in the laboratory, the field, the classroom, or the political arena. This shift in interest in connection with new modes of knowledge production raises new questions regarding the “archive” of science: what should be preserved and where to make it possible to reconstruct scientific practices in the desired detail? While digital media may be able to bridge some of the traditional divisions between the collection of scientific artefacts in museums and the written archival depositories, the move to performing science in silico produces new challenges in respect to establishing the material archives of current science. The paper will discuss these and related questions with special reference to the archives of the contemporary life sciences.