Insights from the Making and Knowing Project’s Pedagogy-Driven Research

In December 2019, the Making and Knowing Project (directed by Pamela H. Smith, Columbia University) launches its Digital Critical Edition of BnF Ms Fr 640, a little-known compilation of roughly 1,000 entries detailing artisanal processes, first-hand experiments in material transformation, and observations about everyday life in Renaissance Toulouse. Since 2014, the Project has been studying the intersections of craft making and scientific knowing in the early modern period through the lens of this manuscript. It has fused pedagogy with humanities research and taught over a hundred graduate students historical, hands-on materials-based, and digital research methods while generating major, public-facing research results.

While outputs such as the Project’s Digital Critical Edition can serve as models for other scholars, the lessons of project design, development, and completion are often effaced in the final product. Much of the value of the Making and Knowing Project has come from hard-won insights into novel and effective ways of conducting iterative, pedagogy-driven research, hands-on experimental history of science, interdisciplinary collaboration, and investigations in the digital humanities. Scholars, instructors, and research groups continue to contact the Project to draw on its experience, and this is evidence that the public face of completed projects, especially digital ones, are neither intuitive nor sufficient guides for the research community, especially for those in the nascent stages of project or syllabus design. The Project is preparing a formal articulation of its methodologies to be disseminated and sustained as an adaptable and scalable implementation guide and resource set for others to draw on in their own teaching and research.