RESUMEN
While cheminformatics skills necessary for dealing with an ever-increasing amount of chemical information are considered important for students pursuing STEM careers in the age of big data, many schools do not offer a cheminformatics course or alternative training opportunities. This paper presents the Cheminformatics Online Chemistry Course (OLCC), which is organized and run by the Committee on Computers in Chemical Education (CCCE) of the American Chemical Society (ACS)'s Division of Chemical Education (CHED). The Cheminformatics OLCC is a highly collaborative teaching project involving instructors at multiple schools who teamed up with external chemical information experts recruited across sectors, including government and industry. From 2015 to 2019, three Cheminformatics OLCCs were offered. In each program, the instructors at participating schools would meet face-to-face with the students of a class, while external content experts engaged through online discussions across campuses with both the instructors and students. All the material created in the course has been made available at the open education repositories of LibreTexts and CCCE Web sites for other institutions to adapt to their future needs.
RESUMEN
In two books published in 1969 and 1973, the philosopher François Dagognet articulated a sharp contrast between the verbal and the visual in the history of chemical representation. Ursula Klein took up Dagognet's argument as both inspiration and foil in her account of Berzelian formulas as productive "paper tools." Building on Klein's work, I show how Dagognet portrayed chemical names and formulas not just as representations and paper tools, but as material abstractions that were objects of inquiry in themselves. Dagognet associated this way of doing chemistry with chemists' use of computers, citing the work of the physical organic chemist Jacques-Émile Dubois. However, I show that chemical editors and mathematicians had begun to treat chemical names and formulas in this way long before anyone used computers for such studies. Indeed, some of the techniques of graph theory central to the application of computers to chemistry in the mid-twentieth century were themselves in part derived half a century earlier from the application of chemical formulas to mathematical reasoning.
RESUMEN
At the Geneva Nomenclature Congress of 1892, some of the foremost organic chemists of the late nineteenth century crafted a novel relationship between chemical substances, chemical diagrams, and chemical names that has shaped practices of chemical representation ever since. During the 1880s, the French chemist Charles Friedel organised the nomenclature reform effort that culminated in the Geneva Congress; in the disorderly nomenclature of German synthetic chemistry, Friedel saw an opportunity to advance French national interests and his own pedagogical goals. Friedel and a group of close colleagues reconceived nomenclature as a unified field, in which all chemical names ought to relate clearly to one another and to the structure of the compounds they represented. The German chemist Adolf von Baeyer went a step farther, arguing for names that precisely and uniquely corresponded to the structural formula of each compound, tailored for use in chemical dictionaries and handbooks. Baeyer's vision prevailed at the Geneva Congress, which consequently codified rules for rigorously mapping structural formulas into names, resulting in names that faithfully represented the features of these diagrams but not always the chemical behaviour of the compounds themselves. This approach ultimately limited both the number of chemical compounds that the Geneva rules were able to encompass and the breadth of their application. However, the relationship between diagram and name established at the Geneva Congress became the foundation not only of subsequent systems of chemical nomenclature but of methods of organising information that have supported the modern chemical sciences.