Tues || 8.28: In-class meeting
In what ways do past and present images portray the scientist as "other"? What's at stake?
 The Scientist as Superhero in the Age of Enlightenment: Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century / The Scientist as Superhero in the Atomic Age: Albert
Einstein in the 20th century
 The heroic image turned upside-down: Walt Disney. "The Mad Doctor" (1933) [approx. 7 minutes]The Mad Doctor
 Where do regular non-heroic scientists come from? How do you know if you’re “a science person” or “not a science person”?

week 2 reading

• Standish, The Hollow Earth, Chapters 2-3, pp. 39-107
• Agnes Mòcsy, “The Lone Genius Paradigm and Our Infatuation with Intellectual Heroes,” Huffington Post (March 2016)
• Charles Dickens, "Murdering the Innocents," Chapter 2 from Hard Times (1854); Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
• Felix the Cat (1959) [8 minutes]"Felix Baby-sits"

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online lab session ||
The blog post is due by 10:00 p.m. on Wed 9.5 (typically the blog posts will be due on the Monday evenings before Tuesday's class, but this Monday is a holiday.)

For instruction on setting up your adobe spark blog site, see the Week 1 module.

And here is the memo about the blog posts themselves that I passed out in class.

Online assignment #2: Dinosaurs and Speculative Science
Instructions:

1. Visit the sites below via the hyperlinks (Semonin, Pflieger, Wijgerde, Riesco, Meier; Carlson is optional).

2. You can use the questions here to help you think about what to discuss in your blog post. They are a guide -- you can tackle all of them, or one in particular if you want to focus on it, etc. You can also bring in questions of your own as long as they fall within the general topic areas.

What conclusions did people come to about what dinosaurs must have been like as they learned about the fossils?
In what ways was 19th century paleontology different from our standard view of what "science" is? (Think about who is involved, what is discussed, how does scientific investigation occur, what is its structure and scale?)
How did the "simultaneous" experience of experts, the regular public, and children in regard to learning about strange and brand-new facts on a relatively even footing influence the cultural nature of science in the 19th century do you think?

 Paul Semonin, “Peale’s Mastodon: The Skeleton in Our Closet,” Common-place, (January 2004)
 Pat Pflieger, “A Former State of this Earth: Fossils in Early American Works for Children”
 Tim Wijgerde, “Victorian Pioneers of the Marine Aquarium,” Advanced Aquarist, (February 2016)
 Daniel Riesco, "The Evolution of Dinosaur Art," Medium (December 2017) Alison Meier, “The First Sculptures of Dinosaurs,” Hyperallergic (September 2017)

 Laura Carlson, "A Victorian Dinosaur Dinner," supplemental text and illustrations from The Feast [audio episode itself optional; approx. 35 min]

. . .and to follow along with your reading in The Hollow Earth, here are some examples from the 19th century and the 21st century:

 Illustrations from google search for “Jules Verne” and “Journey to the Center of the Earth”

 Scenes from Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008): scene 1 [3:31 min] and scene 2 [3:32 minutes]