Typing Physics: The essential role of typists in intra-scientific communication

I present an analysis of the changes to intra-scientific communication in postwar American physics. In particular, I focus on a case study of the technical typists who worked for the American Institute of Physics (AIP) journals, especially the Physical Review (PR), c. 1962-1977. I argue PR became a trading zone amidst the page-charge crisis, and analyze the networks of physicists, typists, editors, and copy-editors that emerged to resolve this threat to community-level objectivity. Challenging the picture of typist as "automaton", I identify the skills and technical knowledge needed to perform manuscript transcription, and offer an account of the material culture of intra-scientific communication to situate the typists' epistemic role in the broader context of "Big Science" changes to postwar physics. I claim this is a case of an epistemic contribution that has been instrumentalized, akin to human computers and human scanners. However, unlike other cases of instrumentalization, technical typists were not directly involved in the production or critique of scientific data. Rather, their novel contributions occurred in the new field of mathematical typesetting that emerged from this trading zone. Thus, I seek to differentiate the material culture of scientific experiments from the material culture of intra-scientific communication. I see this project as an extension of Galison's trading zone framework, recognizing that there are many more material objects besides those of the laboratory that are created in the scientific process.