Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. From now until the launch of Oxford Events, new events cannot be published or edited on OxTalks while all existing records are migrated to the new platform. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period.
From 16th, Oxford Events will launch on a new website: events.ox.ac.uk, and event submissions will resume. You will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
Tables have long constituted one of the principal graphic tools through which scientists represent their understanding of the natural world. Nowhere is this more visible than in astronomy, where tabular traditions stretch back to the Babylonians of the first millennium before the common era. Origin stories of fundamental cognitive and epistemic change have relied heavily on the translation of celestial experience into tabular formats, a development said to be driven by broad media shifts (orality to literacy, script to print). In this talk, I show to the contrary that despite the affordances of print and the long history of tabular formats for astronomical purposes, early modern European scholars’ motives for sending records of astronomical observation to the press were contingent and local, as were the emerging conventions of representing such empirical data within the economy of the printed page.
