Speaker
Daniel Lahham
Title
Exploring the Snark’s Boojumness: Networking Animal Research Periodicals
Abstract
In 1949, Frank A. Beach delivered an address as co-president of the APA Experimental Division. He argued that comparative psychologists had become too reliant on the albino rat as a test species, warning that comparative psychology would cease to exist should it continue on its current path. These arguments are better understood if we consider Bolker’s (2009) distinction between exemplary and surrogate models: exemplary models are used for basic research that can be generalized to a larger group, whereas surrogate models serve to represent a specific target species group that would otherwise be difficult to study themselves. The rat, a surrogate for the human, was being used by comparative psychologists as an exemplary model in understanding learning. This was based on the assumption that learning was general across species. Since the famous “The Snark was a Boojum,” historians have grappled with the issue of organism choice in each decade. In most cases, historians have considered the same set of journals (Journal of Animal Behavior, Psychobiology, and the Journal of Comparative Psychology; herein JCP), extending the years following Beach’s cutoff point of 1948.
My project explores the research species chosen in multiple scientific periodicals over a time period from 1911 to 1940. I created social networks using the program Gephi, linking the research species with the authors of the articles, and with their institutions. The most interesting finding was the distinct shape of each network among the four periodicals. As expected, the rat dominated the JCP network, with the human forming the other significant community. The Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology (P.Sem) shared a similar structure to the JCP network, instead with the human being the dominant community and the rat the secondary. The final two networks, the Journal of Genetics (J.Gen) and the Journal of Experimental Zoology (JEZ), lacked the dominant, species-based communities that were prevalent in the first two. The use of other scientific periodicals was chosen as a representative of the other kinds of animal research that was being done in the academic sphere.