We often overlook the role played by the artisanal/maker clusters across Africa.Is there something to learn from the work of MacArthur prizewinner Pamela O. Long? Her:
...prize-winning book, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (2001), presents groundbreaking analysis of the co-evolution of artisans as writers and technological openness as an ideal in scientific inquiry. Long illustrates the complex relationship between authorship and the ownership of intellectual property; the act of authorship simultaneously makes information public—at least to those with access to the text—and asserts the author’s ownership of that information. Her second sole-authored book, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (2011), revisits a central issue in the history of science: the influence of artisans, craftsmen, and engineers on the introduction of empirical methodologies into science. Long discards the historical framing of dichotomies—artist or scholar, practice or theory—by identifying arenas of communication and collaboration among individuals arrayed across a continuum from artisan to scholar.
