“The people most affected by climate change are no longer some imagined future generation.”

Sir David Attenborough, speaking to world leaders at the opening ceremony of COP26

An installation of planet Earth at the COP26 venue in Glasgow,
photo by Dr Lucy Wallace

 

The British Library and the Institute for the Modelling of Socio-Environmental Transitions (IMSET) at the Bournemouth University are collaborating on a series of workshops, to be held after the COP26, to help us reflect on how communities have coped with environmental change in the past and the lessons we can learn as we respond to the effects of climate change happening right now. We will be drawing on discussions from the annual climate change conference COP26 and the latest knowledge about climate change adaptation, to explore how we can manage environmental change in three different landscapes across Britain, and how we can make those who live in these landscapes more resilient.

In preparation for these discussions, Dr Lucy Wallace writes from the COP 26 in Glasgow:

Climate change has always seemed far away, something that will affect someone else. However, in the last decade, narratives have shifted away from polar bears on melting ice caps, to breaking news about forest fires in southern Europe and flooding across Britain. This movement from far away, to closer to home, and from habitat destruction to something that can directly affect our livelihoods, is significant. However, if we just think about climate change as happening to someone else, somewhere else, where does that leave us?

The situation we find ourselves in today was not inevitable but rather is a result of actions we have both knowingly and unknowingly taken throughout the history of humankind. Since early humans started to settle in one place and make the first attempts to farm, we have been modifying the environments we inhabit for our own gain. This has had huge consequences for biodiversity and for our landscapes. By studying the past, we can increase our understanding of how we got to where we are now, identify the tipping points which led us here and work out what we can do differently in the future.

The past offers an alternative lens from which to view our current crisis. It enables us to widen our horizons by learning from examples of past societal resilience and to identify the underlying social cultural and ecological processes that make up that resilience.

For instance, we can explore data from past land management practices, and the impact these have had on the landscape. Asking questions about the sustainability of these practices during periods of environmental change, and what they meant for the communities of people who employed them, will be key in our fight to survive as we head into the coming decades.

Building resilient communities

Detail from the Together for Our Planet installation, photo by Dr Emma Jenkins

To preserve a liveable climate, greenhouse-gas emissions must be reduced to net 0 by 2050. We need to accelerate action this decade to ensure we have a chance to meet this target. This need to reduce emissions is the key point currently being discussed by nation states at the COP26 and is always a highly politicised and contentious issue.

Whatever is agreed at COP26 though, we know our climate is changing now. We need to consider how we can protect our British landscapes, and how do we encourage resilience in the communities of people who inhabit them.

Climate change is not just increasing temperatures. The IPCC reports show us that climate change will result in more extreme weather events, such as storms, flooding, fires, and heatwaves.

Building resilience in our communities means we will be better placed to cope with these extreme weather events, or shocks, but how we build resilience will differ depending on the landscape we are looking at.

Complicating the issue is the fact that we have become less resilient to transitions - heavy management of our landscapes has decreased their capacity to cope with environmental change.

Turn tragedy into triumph

We need to work together to find new solutions which offer us a way forward. Building resilience to climate change cannot just come from politicians and cannot simply use a one-size-fits all approach. Involving all parts of society in the discussion is key. This will enable the co-creation of solutions for different landscapes, which will be vital for us to find a way through this crisis. These ways forward will leave no-one behind and will help us to find opportunities in the challenges we face as we move forward.

This new future has the potential to be a different type of Anthropocene to what has come before. Where before there was a lack of awareness of the true impact that we have had on the environment, we now have the knowledge that we need to do things differently, and we need to pull together to make it happen.

Join us for further discussion on 22/24/26 November. You can book your space here. 

"Garden cucumber" from Blackwell's Herbal, British Library 34.I.12 -13

Some of our earliest high-quality digitised manuscripts and printed books are now available again through our website for anybody to read. They were digitised from the mid-1990s on, using the "Turning the Pages" software created by the Library in collaboration with Armadillo Systems. You might remember seeing them on stand-alone electronic consoles in various parts of the Library. The digitisations include realistic animations of the pages being physically turned and laid down.

Some of the items involved are important in the history of science:

• The complete Codex Arundel, a collection of pages from the private sketchbooks and notebooks of the Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci, predominantly dealing with physics.
• Highlights of Andreas Vesalius's "De Humani Corporis Fabrica", the first modern anatomical textbook, with artwork thought to be by the studio of Titian.
• Highlights of Elizabeth Blackwell's "A Curious Herbal", the first British herbal by a woman, created in the 1730s to buy her ne'er-do-well husband out of debtors' prison.
• Highlights of John James Audubon's famed "Birds of America".

Feel free to browse them on your computer.

 

 

"Museum of Communications" by Cargo Cult is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

We are sorry to announce that we will soon be ending email notifications of new posts to this blog. To make sure you are alerted to new posts, follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ScienceBL. You can also sign up to British Library newsletters as another means of keeping up with us.

 

 

Magicicada septendecim, 17-year-periodical cicada, Danville, Illinois, USA. Wikipedia Commons.

 

The periodic emergence of swarms of cicadas in the eastern United States which is currently underway was one of the first natural history observations to appear in the scientific literature. In 1667 Henry Oldenburg wrote in Volume 1 of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

Strange swarms of insects - A great observer, who hath lived long in New England, did upon occasion, relate to a friend of his in London, where he lately was, That some few years since there was such a swarm of a certain sort of Insects in that English colony, that for the space of of 200 miles they poyson'd and destroyed all the trees of that country; there being found innumerable little holes in the ground, out of which those Insects broke forth in the form of maggots, which turned into flyes that had a kind of taile or sting, which they struck into the tree, and thereby envenomed and killed it.”

The biology of this event is extraordinary. A few closely related species of cicadas (Magicicada septendecim, M. cassini, and M. septendecula) form enormous broods of billions of insects. They emerge from the soil as nymphs that moult into sexually mature adults. This happens in the north eastern US states every 17 years while another cohort of species emerges every 13 years in southern states. Cicadas are true bugs in the same group as the froghoppers that produce the cuckoo spit we see in gardens in the summer.

Active periodical Cicada broods of the United States. US Forest Service.

Males gather in chorus groups and their calls attract females for mating. The calls are distinct for each species, preventing hybridisation and lower fertility. Eggs are laid on plant stems and once they hatch the young nymphs enter the soil and begin to feed on the rootlets of trees, moving deeper to larger roots as they grow. The 13 or 17 years that nymphs stay underground makes for the longest development period of any insect although they are not the longest lived insects, termite queens holding that record at 60 years. Individual cicadas grow to be large over this extended period and populations can reach densities as high as 1 tonne per hectare.

Mass emergence is thought to have evolved in the recent geological past of N America. The cooler temperatures during the Pleistocene, when glaciers reached far below the Arctic, favoured a switch from size dependent to temperature dependent development. Other cicada species living nearer the equator emerge at variable times when each nymph reaches a mature size. But in cooler climates with slower and even more variable emergence the population density in any year would be reduced and mating would become less successful. Synchronised emergence increases the population density and with it the opportunities to find mates. Emerging in huge numbers also surfeits predators and the birds and mammals that feed on the cicadas are spoilt for choice, leaving plenty of adults to reproduce.

So, 354 years after their first scientific description periodic cicadas are still the focus of research – how do these insects count the years and why do they count in prime (13 and 17) numbers? These questions are still very far from being answered.

Further reading

Francisca Fuentes Rettig and Lucy Rowland. “Reading Brood X” American Collections Blog. The British Library. 18 May 2021. https://blogs.bl.uk/americas/2021/05/reading-brood-x.html

Stephen Jay Gould. “Of bamboos, cicadas and the economy of Adam Smith”, in Ever since Darwin (London, Burnett Books, 1978)      pp.97-102. British Library shelfmarkX.329/11640

Kathy S. Williams Chris Simon. The ecology, behavior and evolution of periodical cicadas. Annual Review of Entomology. 1995. 40:269-95. British Library shelfmark 1522.500000. Also available online

 

Richard Wakeford

Science Reference Team

 

 

 

We are happy to announce that this week we have acquired the Wiley Digital Archives of several major learned societies. The collections currently available are those from the New York Academy of Sciences, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Royal College of Physicians. The database also includes scientific material from major British universities, digitised as part of the BAAS project.

Information in the archives includes field notes on Hausa Islamic law, beginners' lessons in the Mole language spoken in parts of Ghana, research for a government investigation into early-Victorian mine ventilation, reports on an earthquake in Erzerum, Turkey in 1859, a recipe for a "very rare and excellent" seventeenth-century "wound drink", and a huge range of maps. The Royal College of Physicians collections include a number of digitised incunabula and medieval printed books. For those items which might be harder to read, automated transcriptions are available.

Unfortunately the database cannot currently be used from outside the Library, but we are open again and any reader with an interest in the history of science is highly recommended to come in and try it out.

Left: Trofim Lysenko in 1938. Picture in public domain. Right: Donald Michie c. 1980s. (Add MS 88958/5/4). Reproduced with permission of the estate of Donald Michie.

In August 1957, a 33-year-old Donald Michie travelled across Europe to visit Moscow. The journey was a remarkable one. Driving through Germany and Poland in a 1948 Standard drop head coupé with his friend from Oxford, John Matheson, the pair had lively encounters with enthusiastic locals, a Polish hitchhiker, and even an offer for their car from a film director in Russia.ⁱ

Whilst visiting the Institute of Genetics in Moscow, Michie had a chance encounter with Trofim Lysenko, the infamous Soviet geneticist. Seizing the opportunity, a five-hour interview between the two and Lysenko’s colleagues ensued, with a transcript and reports following in British publications over the following 12 months. What had started out as the tour of a young socialist had turned into a golden chance to meet and interrogate the man at the centre of one of the greatest scientific controversies of the twentieth century.

The British scientific community was rocked in the 1940s and ‘50s by the rise of Lysenko to Director of the Institute of Genetics in Moscow. His theories and methods (both scientific and as a political figure) prompted resignations from scientific societies, radio broadcasts and journal articles denigrating him, and no small degree of infighting as people attempted to separate the emerging Cold War political divide from the scientific merits (or demerits) of his work. Michie, as a young geneticist forging his career in this time, found himself at the heart of this.

Lysenko was a neo-Lamarckist, arguing that characteristics acquired in response to the environment an organism lives in could then be passed on to future generations. The traditional view of the 1950s, based on the work of Gregor Mendel, was that the environment’s role was limited to accelerating or slowing down random mutations of genes. Lysenko’s belief in this view was not the only factor in driving controversy. The international scientific community was also concerned by the state endorsement of his science within the Soviet Union, prompting the disappearance, side-lining, or death of prominent critics, such as N. I. Vavilov. Lysenko’s precise liability remains an issue of contention to this day.

Michie’s visit to the Institute of Genetics. Left to right: Kosikov, Ružica Glavinic, John Matheson, Trofim Lysenko, Nuzhdin, Anne McLaren and Donald Michie. Reproduced with permission of the estate of Donald Michie.

Michie was carving out his career in genetics in the 1950s. By 1953, he had finished his DPhil in mammalian genetics under the supervision of E. B. Ford at Oxford. He then moved to work as a researcher at UCL alongside notable figures such as J. B. S. Haldane, Michie’s second wife and celebrated biologist Anne McLaren, and future Nobel Prize winner Peter Medawar. Michie had already dipped his toe in the waters of the Lysenko debate in a remarkable exchange of letters to an obscure rabbit breeders’ magazine, Fur and Feather, showing himself unafraid to side with controversy as he argued in favour of testing Lysenko’s theories.ⁱⁱ

First page of Donald Michie, ‘Interview with Lysenko’, Soviet Science Bulletin, V (1 & 2, 1958), 1-10. Add MS 89202/11/6

The interview with Lysenko revolved around a major theme from Michie: would Lysenko be prepared to share his methods, publish work in English and permit exchanges of personnel with Western institutions? Michie’s belief was that differences between the West and Soviet Union could be overcome through collaboration and openness, fostering a spirit of sharing knowledge. Lysenko agreed with the sentiment, responding:

I do not agree with this division into Western genetics and Soviet genetics. Science is unitary. I believe, and my colleagues believe, that science knows no frontiers.ⁱⁱⁱ

Both Michie and Lysenko argued for letting scientific results win the debate, however they understood the obstacles in the way of that outcome rather differently. Lysenko saw bad faith and entrenched attitudes from Western scientists, believing them unwilling to entertain the possibility of Soviet scientists producing good research. Michie saw barriers to accessibility, such as the poor understanding of the Russian language in the West. He criticised the stubbornness of Lysenko and his colleagues to share their techniques and offer work for publication in English journals, whilst also castigating Western scientists for not engaging with the science and testing it rigorously and with an open mind.

Ultimately, Michie concluded from his meeting with Lysenko:

The only certain remedy that I can see is to reunite the genetical profession in a single scientific brotherhood irrespective of politics, nationality or genetical creed. … In more definite terms, Soviet and East European biologists must be willing to publish in Western journals and vice versa.^iv

The question which follows is: Did Michie’s interview impact Lysenko’s reputation in Britain?

The short answer is probably not. For instance, Michie drew upon Lysenkoist scientists in a remarkable 1958 essay reflecting on 100 years since Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.^v The references to Lysenkoists were not well-received by reviewers, with them finding Michie’s piece out of step with the tone of the other essays in the collection. Lysenko’s reputation was, at least in the late 1950s, still entrenched negatively in the Western scientific world.

Shortly after these interventions, Michie drifted away from the world of genetics to pursue his long-standing interest in computers and artificial intelligence following his move to the University of Edinburgh in 1958. As such, his contributions on Lysenko petered out. He would go on to become one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence research in the United Kingdom. Never one to shy away from controversial topics, he found himself at the centre of the heated Lighthill debate in the 1970s concerning the funding of AI projects.

Lysenko’s reputation has largely remained contentious in the UK. Whilst there have been attempts to rehabilitate his science and separate it from his political reputation, such as by Chinese scientist Yongsheng Liu in the early 2000s, there is still a great deal of baggage associated with Lysenko.

Reflecting on the Lysenko controversy nearly 50 years later, Michie remarked:

Perhaps history is not after all a documented story of what probably happened. Rather, perhaps history is whatever tale of mystery and imagination becomes in the end too embedded to set straight.^vi

Whilst this may have been one tale which Michie could not set straight, his open-mindedness and commitment to scientific exchange as an early-career researcher are admirable and fascinating to see in the face of such a controversial and fraught debate.

Matt Wright

Sources and Further Reading
Michie, D., ‘The Moscow Institute of Genetics’, Discovery, October 1957, pp. 432-434, p. 434. Available in Add MS 89202/11/6.
Michie, D., ‘Interview with Lysenko’, Soviet Science Bulletin, V (1 & 2, 1958), 1-10, p. 4. Available in Add MS 89202/11/6.
Michie, D., ‘The Third Stage in Genetics’, in A Century of Darwin, ed. By S. A. Barnett, (London: Heinemann, 1958), pp. 56-84.
Donald Michie to Judith Field, 14 July 2005, in London, British Library, uncatalogued digital collection.

Matt Wright is a PhD student at the University of Leeds and the British Library. He is on an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership researching the Donald Michie Archive, exploring his work as a geneticist and artificial intelligence researcher in post-war Britain.

Donald Michie at the British Library
The Donald Michie Papers at the British Library comprises of three separate tranches of material gifted to the library in 2004 and 2008. They consist of correspondence, notes, notebooks, offprints and photographs and are available to researchers through the British Library’s Explore Archives and Manuscripts catalogue at Add MS 88958, Add MS 88975 and Add MS 89072.

i Details of Michie’s trip driving across Europe in a 1948 Standard drop head coupé are available in Add MS 88958/3/21.
ii These letters are available in the Donald Michie archive: Add MS 88958/3/20.
iii Donald Michie, ‘Interview with Lysenko’, Soviet Science Bulletin, V (1 & 2, 1958), 1-10, p. 4. Available in Add MS 89202/11/6.
iv Donald Michie, ‘The Moscow Institute of Genetics’, Discovery, October 1957, pp. 432-434, p. 434.
v For more details, see Donald Michie, ‘The Third Stage in Genetics’, in A Century of Darwin, ed. By S. A. Barnett, (London: Heinemann, 1958), pp. 56-84.
vi Donald Michie to Judith Field, 14 July 2005, in London, British Library, uncatalogued digital collection.

The past year has seen many a new word popping up in our languages: Furlough (from the Dutch ‘verlof’ or paid leave), social distancing, lockdown, you name it. Most of these have ‘gone viral’, just like the virus itself. And just like the virus itself the word ‘virus’ mutated over time.

The word ‘virus’ was long known in science, but it was not used to describe the pathogen we know it to be. That was the work of Dutch biologist Martinus Willem Beijerinck.

Portrait of Martin Willem Beijerinck, Wikipedia Commons

 

Beijerinck was the third of three scientists who had worked on the tobacco mosaic disease, an infection that could devastate whole crops. He continued the work done on the disease by Adolf Mayer, former Director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at the Agricultural School in Wageningen where he himself was based. Meyer found that if a bacterium was the cause, there was something strange going on but he could not figure out what it was.

Portrait of Adolf Meyer in 1875. Wikipedia Commons

The next step in the right direction was made by Russian botanist Dmitrii Ivanovsky He concluded that the tobacco mosaic disease is caused by something much smaller than a bacterium, because it had slipped through the finest filters of the time, that no bacterium could cross.

He published his findings in several publications, amongst which was an article entitled ‘Die Pockenkrankheit der Tabakspflantze’, published in Mémoires de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences de Saint-Pétersbourg in 1890.

Dmity Ivanovski, from a USSR postage stamp celebrating the centenary of his birth

 

Apparently this was not picked up by our third man, Beijerinck. He conducted similar research on the tobacco mosaic disease as Ivanovsky had done, but concluded there had to be a new form of infectious agent. Because it was soluble in water Beijerinck called it Contagium vivum fluidum and he called the pathogen ‘virus’ to distinguish it from bacteria.

He also suggested the new idea that viruses were only capable of reproducing in cells of other organisms. His hypothesis was confirmed a few years later, when electron microscopes became available. I am not sure whether Beijerinck lived to see this new type of kit, because he died in 1931, the year it was invented.

Title page of 'Verzamelde geschriften van M. W. Beijerinck ter gelegenheid van zijn 70sten verjaardag…' The Hague, 1940. 10761.i.33

 

Marja Kingma, Curator Germanic Collections.

References and further reading:

Beijerinck, Martinus Willem, Verzamelde geschriften van M. W. Beijerinck ter gelegenheid van zijn 70sten verjaardag ... uitgegeven door zijne vrienden en vereerders. (Delft, 1921-1940.) 6 vols. Shelfmark 12260.l.13.

Iterson Jr. , G. van, Dooren de Jong, L.E. den, Kluyver, A.J., Maritinus Willem Beijerinck. His life and his work. The Hague, 1940. Shelfmark 10761.i.33 Separate publication in English translation of part 2 of vol. 6 of 'Verzamelde geschriften'. Another edition was published in 1983 by Science Tech in Madison, Wisconsin. Shelfmark 85/11941

Iwanowski, D. (1892). "Über die Mosaikkrankheit der Tabakspflanze". Bulletin Scientifique Publié Par l'Académie Impériale des Sciences de Saint-Pétersbourg / Nouvelle Serie III (in German and Russian). 35: pp. 67–70. Translated into English in Johnson, J., Ed. (1942) Phytopathological classics No. 7, pp. 27–-30 Neither item held by the BL.

Zaitlin, Milton. The Discovery of the Causal Agent of the Tobacco Mosaic Disease. In: Discoveries in plant biology / S.D. Kung and S.F. Yang (Eds.). Hong Kong, 1998, Chapter 7, pp 105-110. Available at https://www.apsnet.org/edcenter/apsnetfeatures/Documents/1998/ZaitlinDiscoveryCausalAgentTobaccoMosaicVirus.pdf.

We are very happy to hear that zbMATH, one of the most important bibliographic databases in the field of mathematics, is now freely available to all online. The database is run by FIZ Karlsruhe, the European Mathematical Society and the Heidelberg Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the funding to make it free to all was provided by the Joint Science Conference, the German national government organisation for science research funding and policy.

The database covers mathematics books and scholarly articles comprehensively since 1868, with some items from considerably earlier. It includes material from the paper abstracts journals Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik (1868-1945) and Zentralblatt für Mathematik (1931-2013). It can be searched by author and subject as normal, but also includes searching by mathematical formula and the subject-specific Mathematics Subject Classification. It includes not just abstracts, but independent reviews of the significance of important articles, although some of these are in German rather than English. It also has both forward and backward citation data. Where possible links to the online full-text item are provided.

The administrators are currently working on developing an API to allow content from zbMATH to be used in other digital information systems on an open access basis.

Anybody with an interest in mathematics is heartily recommended to try it out.

Many of our recent COVID-19 discussions and experiences have had a generational element and impact, from the devastating impact of pandemic on the older generation, especially in care homes, to university students self-isolating in their halls of residence and undergoing a mass testing before returning to their families for Christmas.  The pandemic seems to have highlighted pre-existing narratives about intergenerational differences – on one side, baby boomers who, we are told, benefited from the post-war economic boom, in the process getting richer and more conservative politically, and, on the other side, millennials, often described as technology savvy and individualistic, political ‘snowflakes’, experiencing an adulthood of precarious employment and housing.

While the media caricatures of different generations are often extreme, researchers and scientists have a lot to say about intergenerational dynamic in all areas of life, from the attitudes to climate change, to the changes in social mobility, and the changing employment and economic prospects.

The British Library and Alan Turing Institute latest Data Debate will explore different aspects of intergenerational differences and what data and research tell us about these differences and their implications for our future.

On this occasion, our panel will include:

Dr Jennie Bristow is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Canterbury Christ Church University, an Associate of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, and a writer and commentator on the ‘generation wars’. Her recent books include: The Corona Generation: Coming of age in a crisis (with Emma Gilland, Zero Books 2020); Generational Encounters with Higher Education: The Academic–Student Relationship and the University Experience (with Sarah Cant and Anwesa Chatterjee, Bristol University Press 2020); Stop Mugging Grandma: The ‘generation wars’ and why Boomer blaming won’t solve anything (Yale University Press 2019); and The Sociology of Generations: New directions and challenges (Palgrave Macmillan 2016).

Mr Angus Hanton is a Co-founder of the Intergenerational Foundation, a vehemently independent and non-party-political think tank that focuses on intergenerational fairness in the UK. A self-confessed baby boomer and economist, Hanton believes that successive governments have unwittingly overseen the transfer of assets, benefits and resources to older generations, whilst passing increasingly unsustainable liabilities to younger and future people.

Dr Florian Hertel studies the causes and effects of social inequality in post-industrial societies. Specifically, he is interested in understanding what drives social mobility trends and international variation in intergenerational mobility. He currently works with the Department of Socioeconomics at the University of Hamburg and was visiting Professor of Sociology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Florian published his work in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces and Research in Stratification and Social Mobility. Last summer, his recent work on social mobility and inequality was awarded the RC28’s Significant Scholarship Award.

Professor Ganna Pogrebna is a decision theorist, behavioural scientist and a Turing Fellow. Before joining The Alan Turing Institute, she worked at the University of Innsbruck (Austria), the University of Bonn (Germany), Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin (Germany), University of Sheffield (UK), and Columbia University in New York (USA). She is currently a Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Birmingham and a Research Fellow at Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) at the University of Warwick.

Dr Tracey Skillington is Director of the BA (Sociology) in the Department of Sociology & Criminology, University College Cork. She is the author of two monographs on global climate change, Climate Justice and Human Rights (2017, Palgrave) and Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice (2019, Routledge), exploring the justice dimensions of largescale ecological destruction. She is currently a partner in an EU Horizon funded project on Arctic justice and sustainable development (JUSTNORTH, 2020-23). On the issue of data, her research points to the invaluable contribution of data to understanding the nature and extent of the ecological risks we face.

Mr David Sturrock is a Senior Research Economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. His recent work has looked at the savings and wealth holdings of different generations and the impact of inheritances on inequality. David is currently undertaking a multi-year project investigating the impact of rising house prices on inequalities across and within generations and the role of wealth transfers in social mobility. Previously, David was a policy advisor and economist at HM Treasury, working on fiscal policy, spending strategy and the economics of Scottish independence.

The Rt Hon Lord David Willetts FRS is the President of the Resolution Foundation and chaired their Intergenerational Commission. He served as the Member of Parliament for Havant (1992-2015), as Minister for Universities and Science (2010-2014) and previously worked at HM Treasury and the No.10 Policy Unit. Last year he published a second edition of his book The Pinch How the Baby Boomers took their children’\s future - and why they should give it back. He is a member of the Board of UKRI.

The event will be chaired by writer and broadcaster Timandra Harkness. Timandra presents BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofing and has presented the documentaries, Data, Data Everywhere, Personality Politics & The Singularity.

The online event takes place on 10 December 2020 at 5.30pm. Bookings for this event are now open.

Is AI helping or hindering democracy?

Over the last few years, we have seen a range of concerns about the impact of new technologies on democratic process, especially in terms of the impact of online propaganda and misinformation on a rise of populism. There is a worry that the ways of influencing voters of all political persuasions are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and especially that we do not sufficiently understand the role that AI plays in affecting democracy both for good and bad. Or, are we overstating the role that AI plays in societal and political changes of our time? What are the opportunities to improve and better safeguard democracy? Moreover, what is the role of governments, tech giants, and citizens in making sense of the role of AI in the future of democracy?

The Alan Turing Institute and the British Library Data Debate is open to all who wish to engage with these questions. You can join us for a live online discussion on 10 November 2020 at 5.30pm. 

Writer and broadcaster Timandra Harkness will chair the debate. Timandra presents BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofing and has presented the documentaries, Data, Data Everywhere, Personality Politics & The Singularity.

From a previous Data Debate chaired by Timandra at the British Library

Our panel of experts include:

Dr Kate Dommett is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on digital campaigning, political parties, data and democracy. Dr Dommett has recently served as Special Advisor to the House of Lords Committee on Democracy and Digital Technology. She was awarded the 2020 Richard Rose Prize by the Political Studies Association for an early-career scholar who has made a distinctive contribution to British politics. Her Book, The Reimagined Party was published in 2020.

Dr Paolo Gerbaudo is a sociologist and political theorist. He is senior lecturer at King's College London where he directs the Centre for Digital Culture. He is the author of Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (2012), The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest (2017), The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy (2019). He is currently completing a book on politics after populism and pandemic titled The Great Recoil.

Dr Jonathan Hopkin is Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Government and European Institute at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies (2020, Oxford University Press). Previously he taught at the Universities of Bradford, Durham and Birmingham, and held visiting positions at Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, the University of Bologna, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona.  He has published widely on the party politics and political economy of Europe in journals such as the British Journal of Sociology, European Journal of Political Research, Governance, Journal of European Public Policy, New Political Economy, the Review of International Political Economy, Party Politics, Politics and Society and West European Politics.

Professor Helen Margetts is a Turing Fellow and Director of the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute, and Professor of Society and the Internet at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College. From 2011 to 2018, she was Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, a multi-disciplinary department of the University of Oxford dedicated to understanding the relationship between the Internet and society, before which she was UCL's first professor of Political Science and Director of the School of Public Policy (1999-2004). After an undergraduate degree in Mathematics, she worked as a computer programmer and systems analyst for Rank Xerox and Amoco before returning to study political science at LSE (MSc 1990, PhD 1996), where she also worked as a researcher.

Professor Nishanth Sastry is Joint Head of the Distributed and Networked Systems Group at Department of Computer Science, University of Surrey. He is also a Visiting Researcher at The Alan Turing Institute, where he is a co-lead of the Social Data Science Special Interest Group.

Data Debates is a collaboration between The Alan Turing Institute and the British Library and aims to stimulate discussion on issues surrounding big data, its potential uses, and its implications for society.

Registrations are now open.

Join the conversation #TheDataDebates