Scientific archives, unpublished manuscripts in private or public corpuses: historiographical and methodological approaches

Many historians of science develop detailed studies of inedited documents (or sets of documents): letters, unpublished manuscripts (public or private archives), drafts, communications addressed to academies and learned societies that have just been mentioned in a note of a report, documents published in full in the internal reports or journals of these societies but never communicated outside the restricted circle of its members, notebooks of laboratories or notes taken by students, etc.
The contents of those works enrich or transform our historical knowledge of the disciplines involved and often modify the historiography itself. In this symposium it seems interesting to encourage the exchange of experiences between researchers working individually or in teams on such corpuses.
Will be presented:
- First: the contributions which show how the study of such documents can supplement (or understand better or even correct) studies based solely on published literature, and can also complete the biographies and bibliographies of the authors of the original documents, or the scientists quoted in those papers. - Secondly: the original studies of these texts (contents analysis in scientific and historical perspectives). - Third: the contributions dealing with research programs (individual or collective) focused on some corpuses of archives or unpublished scientific papers: circumstances of their rediscovery, purposes of the researchers, forms of communication of the results of those studies (theses, analysis and editing of texts, online websites dedicated to them, etc.). - Fourth: the description or inventory of such corpuses of archives and all kinds of related information. For example: what has been preserved, by whom, where and why? These archives are they from a single source or have they been established through national or international exchanges? Etc. - And finally, of course, all contributions that will show how such researches have contributed to enrich the historiography and to support the work of historians of science. It will also be interesting to compare the methodologies used by researchers or research teams. Conferences on these methodologies will therefore also be welcome.
Here is the program: Symposium 21 AthènesProgram S21