The GLOBAL ACADEMIES-project has located, and obtained permission to access, archival materials of twentieth-century scientific societies on four continents. Its team of researchers have visited present-day scientific societies in India, Brazil, France and the United States, and advised on their collections and ongoing digitization efforts. The archival files located, such as reports on internal elections or correspondence on membership, have not yet been studied systematically in historical research. They enable a deep analysis of the social dynamics that steer 20th-century scholarly interactions within a global context. In addition, the project team conducted digital historical research, using text-mining, into scientific journals and other publications of scientific societies. The use of digital methodologies enabled the team to retrieve passages of scholarly identity formation (e.g. opening speeches, presentations of new members), but also to efficiently analyze paratextual information on the participation of minority groups in scientific societies (e.g. indications of co-authorship).
By combining archival research with the digital analysis of scientific publications, the project has uncovered how family and personal relations play an important role in the regulation of access to minority groups (e.g. women scholars or scholars from the Global South) within twentieth-century scientific societies. The team’s empirical case studies include, but are not limited to, the trajectories of the first female members of the Brazilian Academy of Science in the mid-twentieth century, the position of female astronomers and/or astronomers’ wives within the International Astronomical Union, and the election and relation of Indian scientists to the Royal Society of London.
The project has set up an international network of scholars to develop a special issue on “Scholarly Codes of Conduct in the Twentieth Century” for the Journal for the History of Knowledge, which will appear in 2026. The issue is edited by Joris Vandendriessche, Anna Cabanel and Kaat Wils and makes a conceptual contribution to the field of history of science and knowledge, and science studies at large. It draws historical attention to the varied roles of scholarly codes, both as explicit regulations and as subtle social practices that include or exclude individuals within scientific communities.
Finally, GLOBAL ACADEMIES has set up a relational database on conference attendance within the International Astronomical Union (IAU) between 1922 and 1991. Based on the retrieval of unique archival and published records in the IAU Archives (Paris), the team has assembled data (>12.000 data points) on the frequency of attendance, and the national representation and gender of conference-goers into an open-access data set. The database enables an analysis of the gradual diversification of the global community of astronomers through the delineation of a core/marginal group of frequent/irregular attendees, and the mapping of female attendance and changes in the geographical backgrounds of astronomers over time. The database is further used for education and will be developed into an public website for astronomers, and the public at large.
