The travel of small facts (such as data) across geographical locations and disciplines is increasingly regulated by the private and public sponsors of digital databases. My analysis focuses on the contrast between the strategies supported by the public and private sectors in governing...

This article studies how our understanding of disease transmission has evolved over time from the public health perspective. The main question is: What happens to ‘facts’ in the course of their life history? How do they lead their lives? The concept captures the process that shapes the facts...

Early ethologists such as Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz faced a problem: What constituted a fact about behaviour? How reliably must a behaviour be exhibited (and in how many specimens) before it could be said to be species-typical? And how similar do the behaviours of two species need to be...

In the past few decades, so-called model organisms have become a cornerstone of research in the biomedical sciences. For the scientists, the model organism is both a practice ground for developing laboratory techniques, and a source of insights into common or even universal biological...

In everyday scientific practice, facts come in two sizes: small facts (data acquired by researchers through experimentation or field work), and big facts (claims about phenomena for which data function as evidence). This paper explores the processes through which small and big facts are...

“Population” is often a significant unit of analysis, and a point of passage for facts and models moving between the natural and social sciences, and between animals and humans. But the very existence of a population is a “fact” fraught with challenges: What distinguishes a population...

Eugenics has played an important role in the relations between social and biological scientists of population through time. Having served as a site for the sharing of data and methods between disciplines in the early twentieth century, scientists and historians have tended to view its legacy in...

Eyam is an epicentre of Europe’s plague heritage. Every year, tens of thousands of people visit the Derbyshire village, drawn by stories of its catastrophic plague and the heroic response it elicited. The story they are told - of a self-imposed quarantine preventing disease spreading to the...

We find little support for the Schumpeterian hypothesis of a positive relationship between market power and innovation in 1950’s Britain even though many economists and policymakers accepted it at the time. Pricefixing agreements were very widespread prior to the 1956 Restrictive Practices Act...

This paper analyses the transformation of two of the staple trades of the pre-modern international economy –those in wool and dried codfish– during the transition from the late medieval to the early-modern period. The development of early modern long-distance trade was subject to three major...