About Ant Spider Bee

Our mission is to engage academics and practitioners in exploration, discussion, and reflection about digital practices, methodologies, and applications in environmental humanities work. In fact, the name Ant Spider Bee refers to Francis Bacon’s metaphor about ways of “handling” science:

The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.

–Francis Bacon, The New Organon [Book One], 1620.

Thanks to a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we are pleased to partner with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media as pilot partners for PressForward, the web content aggregator and publication tool. Through its antlike function, PressForward enables the efficient collection of diverse material — environmental, technological, and academic — letting the editors put more resources into its digestion. The blog’s category “The Ant” now features posts from around the Web, drawn from PressForward and curated by the blog’s editors. “The Spider” contains CFPs and conference information, and “The Bee” presents feature articles that contextualize and reflect on current development in the field. PressForward helps us cross-pollinate; we have begun engaging our community in the nomination and contextualization of these posts. Warm thanks to our volunteer editors-at-large Alicia Peaker, Mary Clare O’Donnell, Regina Sharl, Matthew Willis, Pinelopi Kemekenidou, and Katrin Gammel. Interested in volunteering for 1-week shift as an editor-at-large for our PressForward “Ant” feed? Read the guidelines to learn how.

Ant Spider Bee is collaboratively edited by the Rachel Carson Center’s director of the Environment & Society Portal, Kimberly Coulter; Wilko Graf von Hardenberg of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin; and Finn Arne Jørgensen of Umeå University, Sweden. An affiliated project of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich, the PressForward project is advised and supported by Robert Emmett, Martin Spenger, and Iris Trautmann.

We welcome guest contributions on topics related to the blog’s mission. If you would like to contribute, send a brief email describing your proposed post to editors@antspiderbee.net.

 

IMPRESSUM:

Dr. Kimberly Coulter
Director of the Environment & Society Portal
Rachel Carson Center
Leopoldstr. 11a
D-80802 Munich

Contact:
Telephone: +49(0)89 218072352
E-mail: editors@antspiderbee.net

 

For “Bee” texts, when not specified otherwise, a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license applies.
For all other content and images, refer to that item’s individual copyright status.

ISSN: 2365-8975