Hi all,

Thanks for posting your historical examples here. As I mentioned, this is also going to form part of the Scalar project. While we’ve mainly worked on the Scalar project in class, there are two activities related to Section I that I’m going to ask you to perform out of class:

• Make a Scalar page from the historical example that you’ve blogged here. (If you’d prefer to use a different example, you can also do that). Make sure that the “Landing Page” for Section I links to this page. You can also add any relevant links to previously generated Scalar material to the text of your historical example. Make sure to provide an outside link to the source of your example and make sure that your source is reliable!
  • Relevant Screencasts 
    • How to create a page in Scalar
    • Finding and adding media from Scalar’s archives
    • Creating Media Links in Scalar
    • Annotating videos in Scalar

• Make another Scalar page based on Essay 3. This page should include a copy of one of the figures that you included in Essay 3 and a brief interpretation of that figure. (In other words, you’ll be briefly summarizing your thesis). The landing page for Section I should also include a link to this page.
  • Relevant Screencast
    • How to upload an image from your computer’s hard drive to Scalar
    • Finding Creative Commons licensed media to legally include in Scalar 

Also, I wanted to contribute a couple of pieces that I recently came across that seem relevant to the Section I theme:

• From the New York Times: “The Race Is On to Control Artificial Intelligence, and Tech’s Future” 
• An Intelligence Squared Debate: “Don’t Trust the Promise of Artificial Intelligence” 
• Finally, I posted this in one of my comments on your blog posts, but it seems relevant enough to link to here also: The Guardian, “Race and Intelligence: A sorry tale of shoddy science” 

Thanks to all who have posted and commented for their thoughtful responses to the reading. One theme that emerged repeatedly in student blog posts this week was the portrayal of Victor in film adaptations of Frankenstein. The 1931 film was important in establishing the “mad scientist” as a standard character type and Branaugh’s film owes much both to the “mad scientist” tradition and to the more recent emergence of the “hero scientist” in film adaptations.

Shelley’s novel is one of the most important early fictional portrayals of a scientist, and it appeared just as science and medicine were begin to develop into the professional disciplines that they are today. Much attention has been paid recently to how scientists are portrayed in contemporary film. In this Big Think post, researcher Matthew Nisbet reports on his study of portrayals of scientists in film. This study found a recent “trend towards an overwhelmingly positive image for scientists in prime-time television.” Nisbet ties this trend to larger shifts in social perceptions of scientists, highlighting a recent study that found that significantly fewer Americans held negative views of scientists in 2002 compared to 1985. Nisbet’s study identifies four major types of portrayals of scientists in film: “Scientists as Dr. Frankenstein,” “Scientists as powerless pawns,” “Scientists as eccentric and anti-social geeks,” and “Scientists as heroes.”

For a different take on portrayals of scientists in film, see this HuffPost article that argues that Hollywood continues to wage a “War on Science” with largely negative depictions of scientists. (His reference to Breaking Bad does make me wonder if we might find some similarities in the rise and fall of Walter White and Victor Frankenstein…)

We might also ask (indeed we will ask in upcoming classes!) whether Shelley’s novel is, itself, anti-science.

Finally, it would seem remiss of me to ask you think about Frankenstein in film without acknowledging how often its been the target of satire. Of course, these films more often satirize the “mad scientist” of the 1931 film than Shelley’s novel. Below are clips from two of the most memorable send-ups: Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein and Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-n-furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.