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For readers not familiar with the late seventeenth-century engineering marvel, the Canal du Midi, Chandra Mukerji's "Tacit Knowledge and Classical Technique in Seventeenth-Century France: Hydraulic Cement as a Living Practice among Masons and Military Engineers" provides a window into this audacious civil engineering project, approved by France's king for its military value and as a symbol of imperial glory. Mukerji's principle concern here is with the hydraulic cement used as mortar at key points in the 168-kilometer waterway. She uses the canonical thesis—that the Roman recipe for hydraulic cement was lost in the Middle Ages and rediscovered in the eighteenth century—to focus her investigation of the obvious references to hydraulic cement which abound in the Canal's contracts and instructions. She argues that hydraulic cement must have operated as familiar tacit knowledge, familiar enough that project directors often specified its use without bothering to explain how to make it properly. Over the two-decade lifetime of the project, however, Mukerji finds evidence of a generational shift from military engineers who relied on tacit knowledge and tended to keep it secret to their successors who precisely codified the technique, giving it "an authentic formula." Centuries of informally transmitted technological knowledge began to be reconfigured for a more standardized world of formalized knowledge.

Jacob Darwin Hamblin ("Exorcizing Ghosts in the Age of Automation: United Nations Experts and Atoms for Peace") uses the Eisenhower administration's "Atoms for Peace" initiative to call attention to UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) as an international gathering place for social scientists during the first years of the atomic era. The Eisenhower administration, concerned that UNESCO might galvanize world opinion against the peaceful atom program, successfully prevented UNESCO from participating in scientific studies of nuclear power. Perhaps they worried needlessly. Hamblin finds compelling evidence that UNESCO social scientists did not see fear of nuclear technology as stemming from the technology itself (e.g., the effects of radiation). For these social scientists, public opposition to atomic energy projects had little to do with the specific characteristics of nuclear technology and everything to do with a persistent, irrational fear of all forms of technological progress—in particular, the fear of automation. As Hamblin explains, social scientists believed that "[s]omething akin to psychiatric therapy for the entire world might be necessary" (p. 749). Nuclear physicists and biologists should, therefore, keep their disagreements private and present "unified, authoritative information" to help the skittish public accommodate to inevitable technological progress.

When does a scholar's evidence show signs of bias in the creation and storage of its records? Very often. Archives are subject to selective omissions and spurious inclusions by those who tended them in an earlier time. Fire, flood, warfare, and other vagaries of the human condition vex every historian. Even iconic compilations such as the legendary British Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), when interrogated carefully, show startling patterns stemming from the biases of their compilers. Christine MacLeod and Alessandro Nuvolari ("The Pitfalls of Prosopography: Inventors in the Dictionary of National Biography") are concerned with two matters, one methodological (the potential for creeping biases in prosopographical studies) and one historical (the influence of the DNB's particular selection criteria on subsequent histories of the British Industrial Revolution). Collective biographies, such as Khan and Sokoloff's studies of American Inventors, "should go hand-in-hand with a critical reflection on the selection criteria followed by the compilers of the collective biographies that furnish the source materials . . ." Affirming the work of Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, MacLeod and Nuvolari argue that interrogation of selection criteria "should be a compulsory research step" (p. 762). To model this kind of investigation, they scrutinize the biases that governed inclusion and exclusion from the DNB's record of British inventors, analyzing factors such as gender, temporal era, social status, and the type of technological activity involved. These biases shaped the DNB's collective profile of who was an "inventor," and MacLeod and Nuvolari...