Studia Historiae Scientiarum recently published a research article in English by Martin Rohde in the “Science in Central and Eastern Europe” section entitled “Local knowledge and amateur participation. Shevchenko Scientific Society, 1892–1914”.
In this post on our blog, Martin Rohde sketches the most important achievements of his research.
Could you share with the readers the subject of your article?
MR:
How one becomes a part of a scientific community during ‘long winter evenings’? The Ukrainian Shevchenko Scientific Society (Naukove Tovarystvo im. Shevchenka, henceforth NTS) suggested that one spends one’s leisure time with the collection of folk songs and shared romanticized fantasies about them, which one of their most distinguished researchers publicly associated with happy childhood memories, not hard work. Volodymyr Hnatiuk’s initiative was no joke. It was a successful strategy to fill several editions of folklore journals with oral texts collected all over Eastern Galicia and Northeastern Hungary.
What is the role of amateurs in a scientific community that just begins to define itself during the late 19th and early 20th century? How can they be used as helpful resources in large-scale projects? Under what circumstances can they renegotiate their status to serve as experts? The growing importance of the citizen science movement calls for a reevaluation of the knowledge produced by people whom historical discourse did not consider experts. In several projects, citizen scientists seem to serve as ‘workers’ helpful to deal with big data. But is it only their unpaid labor that makes amateurs crucial scientific figures?
In 1892, Shevchenko Scientific Society formulated the goal to become a transimperial center for science in the Ukrainian language. Until 1914, the development of scholarly projects and publications was tremendous despite comparatively limited resources and possibilities. This scholarly center in Habsburg L’viv/Lwów/Lemberg aimed to research all regions defined as Ukrainian in Eastern Galicia and beyond, all . As I argue, the productive integration of ‘amateurs’ into scholarly projects was a crucial tool for NTS to realize regional or local research projects.
In the article I am interested in the following aspects: 1) the perspectives of integrating ‘amateurs’ in the Ukrainian scientific community, 2) the perception of ‘amateurs’ and how they are described, 3) the shift in the view to focus on the ‘amateurs’, their interests, possibilities and qualifications that made them valuable contributors to research.
The article takes a look at the instructions for ‘amateur’ research and by the perspectives NTS provided for them. The discussion is based on two examples: long-term projects on the collection of folklore texts and ethnographica on the one hand, and on the other hand – short-term statistical surveys in early 1911. Long-term individual contacts enabled integration and professional feedback. It was not only their work, but their local knowledge served as a critical resource for successful research of folklore. Accordingly, shouldn‘t the amateurs be called local experts instead?
The politicized project on language statistics was more complicated, it had no feedback-system and did not provide any possibilities for long-term contacts, and it therefore did not contribute to building the scientific community. Folklore and ethnography provoked regional interest and helped to create an audience for scholarly publications among the participating village intelihentsiia. Based on the archival documentation and published sources, these research projects are analyzed together, taking into account different circumstances, between the poles of “national science” and “local knowledge”. The article suggests that Ukrainian amateur researchers contributed substantially to the nation- and region-building in the multinational Empire. Furthermore, by publishing the amateurs’ works and making them so-called ‘real members’ on a par with professional researchers, NTS opened up for them the possibilities to become integrated into a scholarly community and accepted as well-known transregional experts.
