Sleeping beauties

Sometimes, people don’t recognize the importance of a piece of work until years, decades, or even lifetimes later. Anthony F.J. Van Raan describes these types of dormant scientific papers as Sleeping Beauties. The top 100 of them have a publishing year and an awakening year. Important work being rediscovered after publishing isn’t restricted to science, of course. David Byrne expands the definition of Sleeping Beauties to encompass other fields like tech and art. One quirk about Sleeping Beauties is that they’re often rediscovered by people outside of the original field. (For example, I came across David’s book before I found Anthony’s original scientific research.) The most useful thing you can do for a piece of work you admire is to help many other types of people discover it. In doing so, you build your own expertise, and you also give the work more life and help it wake up. The Museum of You The post Sleeping beauties appeared first on Herbert Lui.