Contents: Academic | Student | Popular | Esoteric
The Audiences of Science Communication
Much like the present, the 19th century audiences of science communication could be surprisingly diverse. A small vocabulary was created for this project to highlight and group the most relevant audiences.
Academic
The primary audience of most scientific and philosophical writing are other scholars, and these works (primarily journal articles) assume of the reader a high degree of familiarity with existing literature within the field.
Student
Most academic texts are written to express new information, but works for student audiences introduce the established elements, methods, and questions of a field. Student texts are specifically meant to enculturate a younger generation of scholars into an existing conversation.
Popular
The authors of popular science tend to report on what another has accomplished or argued. Popular texts are far more likely to involve humor and to appeal to politics, nationality, and sensationalism. These texts include newspapers, magazines, and other serials, but may also include books of a general nature.
As remains true today, popular science typically considers a limited range of scientific questions. In the context of 19th century astronomy, these topics included the discovery of new asteroids, eclipses, the possibility of life on another planet, and the growing material divide between amateur and professional stargazers.
Esoteric
A less widely acknowledged audience of science are seekers and practitioners of western esoteric traditions. Like scholarship, esoteric works often rely on dense references and a culture of initiation. The texts marked esoteric in this collection are primarily astrological. Esoteric practitioners have had a long and consistent interest in science and scholarship. While the Vulcan hypothesis was current (and for a little while after as the timeline shows, the inclusion of the planet in astrological texts may have been read by esoteric audiences as a distinction from the repackaged and hackneyed.
Notes
This vocabulary began with a cursory overview of the collected references and has been refined and expanded as patterns emerged. Noticeably this classification is based upon less formal features than the Library of Congress’s target audience codes. Academics are readers of newspapers, and the line between works for popular and student audience is as much a function of syllabus-crafting and individual interest as it is anything contained within the text itself or in a publisher’s catalogs. The classification presented here should be read as shorthand for the sum of various features: the technical aspects of a work (figures, precision), the content depth, the press, the reading-level of the language, and whether and which secondary works the text is in conversation with.