Scientific Personas in Theory and Practice – Ways of Creating Scientific, Scholarly, and Artistic Identities

Abstract

The concept of scientific persona was developed by historians of science at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin fifteen years ago in order to understand how science works and how it can be conducted in a credible way. The Latin word persona means mask and the discussions of the term were elaborations of Marcel Mauss´s introduction of the concept in an article published in 1938 (Mauss 1938). In Mauss´s conceptualisation, persona was a feature that characterized societies in an evolutionary stage—a stage where members of the society had started to perceive themselves as individuals, but were still expected to fulfill certain, culturally defined roles. In such contexts, persona was not mask to cover the ‘real’ self of the performer, but a mask that enhanced certain features of the person. Transferring Mauss’s approach to the scientific world, Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum (2003) defined, in an often cited article in Science in Context, scientific persona as an intermediate between individual biography and social (scientific) institution: it is a cultural identity that forms the individual in body and mind, and creates a collective with a shared and recognizable physiognomy (ways to be and to behave). Daston and Sibum characterized scientific personas as templates that emerge and develop in historical contexts and used the concept to investigate the creation of certain types of scientists: when, how and why have distinct “scientific personae” emerged?

Im/possible Careers. Gendered Perspectives on Scholarly Personae around 1900

“…Given her case, it seems particularly productive to consider a persona as a bricolage constructed in response to various obstacles, exclusions, limitations, and also opportunities. 95 To give an impression both of Schirmacher's impact and of the models she had to compete with I want to conclude these reflections with a few insights into the careers of other personalities mentioned here. Helene Stöcker, whom Schirmacher's first book had so inspired, finally became a guest student of history in Berlin.…”

“…They particularly ask how scientific personae are created in institutions and under institutional conditions and emphasise differences like gender, class, and social background. 13 Falko Schnicke similarly argues for consistently including questions of gender in projects in the history of science. We should, he claims, not only analyse human resources, institutional structures and social practices but also examine whether and how the choice of topics, perspectives, categories and metaphors of research is gendered.…”

The Whole Man: A Masculine Persona in German Historical Studies

“…There is an emerging body of literature on how scholars' 'self-fashioning' or 'presentation of self' -the voices they adopted, the clothes they wore, the beards they grew -conformed to, or challenged, culturally sanctioned standards for male and female conduct in public. 62 Also, following Bonnie G. Smith, Falko Schnicke has done important work in showing to what extent nineteenth-century German historical studies were permeated with masculine values, as evidenced not only by stylized self-presentations (letters, photos, portraits), but also by the social codes regulating male exchange in educational settings (lectures, seminars, historische Übungen). 63 Nonetheless, no one has tried so far to explain why Treitschke-style 'subjectivism' was experienced as more masculine than Rankestyle 'objectivity' or why Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, the man who lent his name to the persona of a 'moralist' historian, was still posthumously perceived as 'a male spirit' in comparison to the 'female one' associated with Ranke.…”

Data-Assisted Persona Construction Using Social Media Data

“…Personas may be influenced by their designers or by researchers who are making assertions about the expectations of other users. The designer team, as well as the example data and their size, form a dynamic mix that unknowingly assigns bias to the personas [22,23]. Salminen et al examined data-generated personas under the assumption that bias may be affected by the age and gender of the persona as well as by the number of generated personas [24].…”