Here's a list of my academic papers, and links to a few other bits and pieces.
The "doi" links for journals go through the Digital Object Identifier website, which routes them directly to the relevant publisher's page. The "text" link goes to the best full-text version that's available for me to reproduce freely. This is sometimes a preprint, or a late production draft.
"Status, scale and secret ingredients: the retrospective invention of London porter". History and Technology 24:3 (2008), 289-306. [doi|text]
With Graeme J N Gooday, edited the volume "By whose standards? Standardization, stability and uniformity in the history of information and electrical technologies". A special edition of the annual History of Technology, volume 28. Contains:
"Michael Combrune, Peter Shaw and commercial chemistry: the Boerhaavian chemical origins of brewing thermometry". Ambix 54:1 (2007), 5-29. [doi|text]
"Retailing scandal: the disappearance of Friedrich Accum". In Amanda Mordavsky Caleb, ed., (Re)creating Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publications, 2007, 32-48. [text]
"What makes a PC? Thoughts on computing platforms, standards, and compatibility", IEEE Annals of History of Computing 29:2 (2007), 88-87. [doi|text]
"Powering the porter brewery". Endeavour 29:2 (2005), 72-77. [doi|text]
"Early heat determination in the brewery". Brewery History 121 (2005), 66-80. [text]
"John Richardson, saccharometry and the pounds-per-barrel extract: the construction of a quantity". British Journal for the History of Science 34:3 (2001), 255-273. [doi|text]
My PhD thesis from 2004.
"The mighty microcosm: home computers and user identity in Britain, 1980-90", a paper I gave at SHOT in 2005. It's not really a finished piece, but I'm including it here because one or two people have cited it. Some of this material was reworked into the 2008 "Standards and compatibility" paper, but the "closed computer microcosm" section (drawing mainly on Acorn examples) hasn't been written up anywhere else.
John Dalton's Manchester: a short walking tour guidebook, based on the "Science Places" audioguide I wrote with John Pickstone. We gave away copies of this at Manchester Histories Festival in 2009.
The Forty-Seven: my first and last piece of fiction in some considerable time. A solvable detective story marking the 2007 sixtieth anniversary of the British Society for the History of Science, it was offered as a prize competition at the Annual Conference in Manchester that year. No murder: it's a "what connects..." problem piece in the tradition of "The Honour of Israel Gow" (which, naturally enough, I hadn't read when I wrote it). There were not many takers for this -- one senior scholar commented that the profession has enough historical conundrums on its plate, without people going around fabricating new ones -- but at least one colleague (hello Aileen!) followed it through to the solution.
The usual disclaimer | Last modified at 20:44, Monday 10 January 2011