Keeping Ideas Alive

The idea for this blog first came to me while I was preparing a talk for the Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) conference in Aberdeen in May 2025. As with all other public and academic lectures I’ve given over the years, I spent quite a bit of time writing up and preparing the slides for this one (choosing the imagery for a presentation alone can take me hours, but that’s partly because I love browsing through Renaissance and Baroque paintings!). I was busy working on another project and had no immediate plans to develop the material I’d put together for this talk into a scholarly publication. So, I was going to do the usual and chuck it into the ‘Miscellaneous’ folder on my drive where I keep all work-in-progress material, talks and presentation notes. But then I thought, why leave it in limbo when I could post it online where others could read it and, perhaps, even find it useful or inspiring? And, for that matter, why keep the rest of my ‘Miscellaneous’ collection hidden in a folder? Of course, writing a blog is not the same as getting published in a conventional media outlet but it’s a good way of keeping ideas alive.

Like my research career, this blog defies traditional ‘academic pigeonholing’. Here you can find pieces on the history of science, the history of science popularisation, the history of statistics and quantification and the history of British sociology. There are also reflections on the public understanding of science and science literacy, and entries inspired by my work in advanced quantitative methods, maths, data visualisation and data analysis in R.

Please note that the material in this blog is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. Leave a comment on the blog entry page if you’d like to use any material published here.