Verticalities in oral histories of science

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the way in which scientists speak—in extended life‐story interviews recorded recently—about the role of verticality (understood here as an orientation in space: up/down rather than across) in past scientific work. In particular, I explore several episodes of scientific work in which (the scientists involved tell us) verticality emerged unexpectedly as an important aspect of the work. I argue that these stories tell us about previously neglected features of the geography of science as well as about the various influences on scientists' written and spoken accounts. I show that attention to stories of fieldwork featuring different aspects of verticality—vertical distance, rate of fall, and position under—sheds new light on the doing of science and its narration after the event, in such different communications as scientific papers and life‐story recordings.