This paper is motivated by two broad questions: how is technologytransferred from academia to non-academic domains, and how welldo facts within these technologies travel? These questions areexplored in the context of a particular extension education program inTamil Nadu, south India. The paper...

In the vast body of development theoretical knowledge oneelement has been of a considerable longevity: the abstraction of aGross Domestic Product to represent a given economic entity.This paper suggests approaching the history of developmentthinking by travelling with the GDP through this...

Early ethologists such as Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz faceda problem: What constituted a fact about behaviour? How reliablymust a behaviour be exhibited (and in how many specimens) beforeit could be said to be species-typical? And how similar do thebehaviours of two species need to be...

The facts of social sciences are ones that stem from scientificexpertise, but in the social world, everyone is their own expert.Everyone lives in society, and experiences either first-hand, orclosely second-hand, the same phenomena that social scientistsinvestigate. Consequently, people are not...

The core question addressed in this paper is: What happens tofacts after their construction? The main contribution is to analysethe different practices of disseminating, circulating and crossfertilizingmodel-produced facts about Haemophilus influenzaetype b and Streptococcus pneumoniae bacterial...

The question of how Italian Renaissance architecture was takenup in other European countries has been the subject of numerousstudies. One interesting example is the building activity in southGermany at the beginning of the 17th century. Major cities like Stuttgartand Augsburg implemented plans...

The presence of classical architectural features in modernWestern architecture shows that knowledge from ancient timeswas travelling through both space and time. Yet despite surfacesimilarities, the architecture of revival was very different to that ofantiquity. The classicistic architecture of...

The travel of small facts (such as data) across geographicallocations and disciplines is increasingly regulated by the private andpublic sponsors of digital databases. My analysis focuses on thecontrast between the strategies supported by the public and privatesectors in governing bioinformatic...

This article studies how our understanding of disease transmissionhas evolved over time from the public health perspective. The mainquestion is: What happens to ‘facts’ in the course of their lifehistory? How do they lead their lives? The concept captures theprocess that shapes the facts of...

In everyday scientific practice, facts come in two sizes: smallfacts (data acquired by researchers through experimentation orfield work), and big facts (claims about phenomena for whichdata function as evidence). This paper explores the processesthrough which small and big facts are circulated...