Pamela H. Smith | Making and Knowing: Guides for Experiential Research and Learning

Since 2014, the Making and Knowing Project has studied the intersections of craft making and scientific knowing. The publication in 2020 of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France made openly accessible a remarkable late-sixteenth-century French manuscript that gives insight not only into early modern art techniques but also into attitudes to nature and its imitation by human art. In 2024, the project launched two companion works to Secrets of Craft and Nature: the Research and Teaching Companion provides step-by-step lesson plans, example student projects, syllabi, and more for all those wishing to integrate hands-on activities into their classrooms, studios, or kitchens. EditionCrafter offers an open-access digital edition publication tool with an enhanced feature set based on Secrets of Craft and Nature for creating digital editions with a user’s own data. This workshop will introduce the Project and its recent publications and tools then lead a hands-on navigation session and discussion. Audience members should bring their laptops or tablets. 

About the Speaker

Pamela H. Smith, Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, is founding Director of the Center for Science and Society and its cluster project the Making and Knowing Project (www.makingandknowing.org). Her books, including The Business of Alchemy (1994), The Body of the Artisan (2004), and From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (2022), investigate craft and practice as a way of knowing. She has collaborated on edited volumes that treat the history of practice, embodied knowledge, and material culture. Other collaborations include the Making and Knowing Project’s multiyear creation of Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France (2020), immersion courses in traditional Thai weaving, human-natural interactions in the minescape, and interdisciplinary workshops. She is now collaborating on a new project on longue durée histories of socio-natural sites of pre-industrial industry.

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and made possible by support from an anonymous donor honoring the Directorship of former SHC Director John Bender, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities