Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Wendy Queen. Wendy is Chief Transformation Officer at Johns Hopkins University Press. Part 1 of this conversation was published last week.
Trevor Owens is chief research officer at the American Institute of Physics. His career brings together history, technology, and community stewardship. In the first part of our conversation, we explored how the tools and sensibilities of the humanities, including oral history, archival practice, storytelling, and sociocultural analysis, are helping to preserve the record of the physical sciences. Today, we examine how these methods also influence the way scientific stories are told, who has the opportunity to tell them, and why they continue to shape our understanding of science today.
The Edges of Knowledge
Wendy: Digital scholarship is central to much of your work. How have digital tools reshaped how we study and present the history of science?
Trevor: Digital tools have reshaped how we study and present the history of science, not through flashy innovation, but through infrastructure that has become so everyday for us. While I’m excited by emerging possibilities in AI, computer vision, and natural language processing, I think some of the most transformational potential still exists in much less cutting-edge parts of digital technology.
More than a decade ago, AIP began publishing transcripts of our oral histories online. What once required a trip to our reading room is now full-text searchable from anywhere, and the impact is measurable: because of broad online access, we’re seeing increased scholarly usage and greater disciplinary diversity in who is using these resources. For instance, a 2024 dissertation in high-energy physics cites a 1997 oral history with Wolfgang Panofsky, and a 2022 business administration dissertation on science and innovation cites interviews with Amnon Yariv and Martin Stickley. The shift is not just technical — it’s cultural.
The transformation in this case is not just about access; it is also about the future of collection development. One of our most distinctive collections is a set of unpublished memoirs from scientists — for example, we are one of two libraries in the world that have copies of Jack Oliver’s 1998 memoir. If you read the preface to his memoir, you find something really striking. He says explicitly that the reason he wrote his story is because he was asked to by some of my predecessors at AIP and at the American Geophysical Union. That speaks to the kind of proactive role that asking people for these stories can play. With that noted, until recently, anyone interested in reading Oliver’s memoir had to physically go either to Cornell University Libraries or to our library.
Because Cornell had the rights cleared, they have now digitized it, and anyone is able to read this memoir in full online. In a born-digital environment, these kinds of personal memoirs can now be received, approved, and shared globally in a matter of days. Given that, we are now broadly inviting members of our physical science communities to document their stories and lives and entrust them to us as a place to preserve and provide access to them. I’m thrilled to share that we have already had a few come in that, similar to Oliver’s memoir, include a mention up front from their authors that they wrote and gifted them to us because we invited them to share their story.
The same applies to photography: the most compelling images in our collections are largely amateur photos from scientists. With the widespread use of smartphones, we are now looking to better support donations of photos directly from members of our communities through online submission workflows.
These examples point to a larger opportunity: digital infrastructure allows us to turn historical preservation and collecting into a more participatory process — inviting physical scientists to be active contributors in documenting and interpreting their own legacies. We can more broadly engage the physical science community in digitally documenting and preserving its history and sharing those resources with humanities and social science researchers to help explore and understand that material.
Wendy: What you describe here is, in many ways, a digital public humanities model in action. It’s not just about digitization as a technical achievement or a strategy for access. It’s about reimagining the very architecture of cultural memory. You’re building systems that invite participation, not just consumption. That move, from preservation as something done to or for a community, to something co-created with them, feels especially significant.
The shift you describe, where scientists become not merely subjects of archival inquiry but active contributors to their own historical record, is a powerful reworking of traditional archival dynamics. In the humanities, we’ve long wrestled with questions of authorship, authority, and voice: Who gets to tell the story? Whose memories matter? How do we account for the silences, gaps, and power structures embedded in our collections?
By designing digital infrastructures that allow scientists to submit photographs, share born-digital memoirs, and reflect on their own lived experiences, you’re opening the door to a more distributed model of historical authorship, one that is participatory, pluralistic, and responsive to the lived experience. It also raises important questions about metadata, context, and care: How do we describe these materials? How do we preserve not just the artifact, but the intention behind it?
To me, this is where the humanities shine: bringing interpretive frameworks to bear on technical processes, ensuring that we don’t confuse access with equity or data with meaning. What you’re building is not just a repository, but a community archive — a living, evolving collection that reflects the complexity and humanity of the scientific enterprise itself.
What role do archives and oral histories play in your efforts to humanize science, and how do you ensure those materials resonate with a broader audience? In addition, how can storytelling, which has long been a strength of the humanities, help enhance public understanding of scientific concepts or scientific institutions?
Trevor: I’m of two minds on how we approach “the public” and public understanding of the issues. First off, I think that trying to reach a “general audience” can end up meaning that we are trying to reach no one in particular especially given the way that our whole web and social media system is fracturing right now, I think it’s all the more important that we all become increasingly deliberate about how we are trying to engage with specific focused audience groups and communities. With that noted, there are hundreds of thousands of people in the physical science community in the United States. There is a lot to be said for engaging with them as a broad community and helping support them to be ambassadors and connectors in their own communities. In that context, while the historical work we do happens in public, it’s not so much about the general public.
At the same time, I also see oral histories, and even more so, “life writing” like biographies and memoirs, playing an important role in connecting broader audiences with science. If you pick up a biography like Vera Rubin: A Life, which is the kind of thing that can connect with a broad audience, and you flip to the back of the book to read the footnotes, you will see that the early chapters — the stories about her life growing up — draw heavily on AIP’s oral histories with her. The later chapters draw heavily on her papers from the Library of Congress. So oral histories in particular are critical resources to help produce stories that can then reach broader audiences. Similarly, Olivia Campbell’s recent book, Sisters in Science, which traces the lives of four women physicists in their dramatic escape from Nazi Germany, is a best-selling book that makes significant use of both AIP’s photo collection and oral histories. To that end, the collections we are building are key resources in helping authors tell robust stories of science and the full lives of scientists that reach broader audiences.
In terms of the question about storytelling, my sense is that there is a powerful storytelling tradition in science that rivals any claim that humanists could stake. In his New York Times Book Review, Anthony Doerr called Sara Seager’s memoir, The Smallest Lights in the Universe, “bewitching.” Hakeem Oluseyi was on Good Morning America to promote his memoir, A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars. My sense is that these kinds of personal stories that include science end up being powerful ways to punch through into a broader readership than pure science content in its own right. Broadly, I think there is a lot of interesting potential to bridge the science writing community, creative nonfiction community, and humanities scholars in this space, too.
Wendy: In your view, what are the most promising opportunities for collaboration between physical scientists and humanities and social scientists today?
Trevor: I’m not sure if these are necessarily the most promising opportunities, but a lot of the work I’ve linked to in our conversation here is illustrative of places where the humanities and social sciences can be very clearly and directly of use to advancing the physical sciences. Janet Vertesi shows us how ethnographers can help scientists optimize team structures. John Besley is showing us how communications research can help science communicators be more strategic in their work. In the same vein, I think historians like Peter Gallison, Jaco de Swart, Dave Kaiser, and Tiffany Nichols are all doing work that does an outstanding job of showing the value that humanities scholarship can play in helping the scientific community better understand itself.
Many of the most pressing issues facing the physical science enterprise in our world today are social science problems and problems that we need to understand in a historical context. It’s important that people understand the role that NSF has played in the postwar science ecosystem in the United States. Earlier this year we produced a report on the impacts of restrictions on federal grant funding on enrollments in physics and astronomy graduate programs that was referenced by a member of Congress in a House Science Committee hearing shortly after we published it.
At the same time, Sara Seager and Hakeem Oluseyi show us in their memoirs how scientists telling the stories of their lives in rich ways can both document the history of science and help build an understanding of what it means to be a scientist and live in our contemporary world.
As these examples illustrate, there are many opportunities for us to all celebrate and draw attention to work that is transcending these boundaries. More than a decade ago, Ian Bogost challenged academics, in particular in the humanities, to focus more on writing books people want to read. I think that exhortation still stands, and I think all the titles I’ve talked about in our discussion here are great models to follow. With that said, I think we can all do a lot to help get the word out about those books to potential readers.
Wendy: This reminds me that some of the most meaningful collaborations don’t happen at the center of a discipline, but at the edges. In those liminal spaces where the boundaries get porous, where questions don’t quite fit, and where established methods begin to feel inadequate. That’s the terrain the humanities are particularly attuned to—places of ambiguity, interpretation, and redefinition. These edges may feel uncertain or even uncomfortable, but they are also where new ideas take root.
Your examples beautifully illustrate how powerful it can be when we approach those disciplinary edges not as problems to be solved, but as generative zones of inquiry. Rather than asking, “How do we make this work fit into a disciplinary mold?” the better question might be: “What new questions emerge when we stop assuming the mold is fixed?” That’s a deeply humanistic move — valuing complexity, embracing contradiction, and creating space for voices or phenomena that don’t conform neatly to existing categories.
In this way, the humanities don’t just help interpret the sciences; they can help reimagine the frameworks within which science itself is understood. When ethnographers work with lab teams, or historians trace the development of subfields, or memoirs reveal the lived experience of scientific careers, we’re not just enriching the narrative; we’re revealing the scaffolding of knowledge-making itself.
And because these liminal zones require negotiation, dialogue, and trust, they demand a kind of intellectual humility that is itself a form of rigor. When we bring that spirit to interdisciplinary work and when we embrace the productive messiness of shared inquiry, we don’t dilute the integrity of our methods—we expand them. We allow for work that is not only methodologically sound, but contextually rich, ethically attuned, and deeply human.
Conclusion
As our conversation makes clear, the work of documenting, interpreting, and sharing the stories of science is not separate from scientific progress. It is a vital part of how knowledge gains meaning and how legacies are shaped. The decisions we make about what to preserve, how we contextualize it, and whose voices we amplify reflect deeply humanistic values. These are questions about memory, authorship, identity, and cultural responsibility. Whether through oral histories, archives, or digital memoirs, this work is not only about access — it is about connection, interpretation, and care.
Trevor’s leadership at AIP provides an inspiring model for what it means to bring humanistic inquiry into active dialogue with scientific practice. Rather than treating disciplines as isolated silos, his work shows what becomes possible when we build bridges, ask reflective questions, and remain open to multiple forms of knowledge. In a time of rapid change across scholarly communication, this kind of integrative thinking feels more necessary than ever.
I am especially grateful to Trevor for his insight, generosity, and openness. It has been a true pleasure to learn from him and to engage in a conversation that brings together many of the questions I care about most. I also want to thank him for partnering with me on this conversation, which marks my first post for The Scholarly Kitchen. It has been a meaningful way to begin, and I look forward to continuing this journey of exploring where science, story, and the humanities come together.
