In the last few years I have started to study the history of my field, cheminformatics, which is a combination of chemistry, computer science, and library science. I began by tracing the development of some of the fundamental ideas in the field - how to represent a molecule on a computer, how do do so uniquely, and how to find molecules based on various approaches. I've also been trying to figure out the role of social and technological factors, and have identified some themes that help tie the different stream of thought together, including some new ones.
Learning about the process of writing has improved my own writing, and given me a vocabulary to understand other writings. I can't imagine any field without its own set of common practices and methods of analysis and criticism. I believe learning the techniques of historical analysis would help me in my historical research.
Last year I read Thomas Haigh's "The Tear of Donald Knuth" in the Communications of the ACM. Knuth is a computer scientist who is also interested in the history of computer science. Knuth lists a few reasons why he, as a practitioner, studies history. For example, by learning where people struggled, and why, he is better able to explain those concepts. These reasons resonate with me.
Haigh goes on to say that in the 1970s there were quite a few people in computer science who wrote these sorts of histories, though that has since decreased. He then writes "The truth is that regrettably little history of computer science, whether dumb or deep, has been written by trained historians even though the history of computing literature as a whole has been expanding rapidly." This seems to confirm my belief that there techniques of historical analysis that I might learn and apply.
My questions are: 1) are there any books or similar self-study resources for people like me (non-historian researchers in a scientific field) who are trying to understand and document the history of their scientific field, 2) what are the tools, methods, or approaches that a trained historian might bring to topic, and 3) how would I gain those skills as they apply to my topic? I've considered a part-time Master's degree, but the local-ish schools look more into the interplay between science and social or environmental policy, while my sort of tight study seems passé.
If it helps any, I live in western Sweden, have an MS in physics, and the last history course I took was in high school. I am also self-employed, which gives me some of the freedom to do this historical research.
I've read quite a number of historical accounts by scientists which are little more than after-dinner anecdotes that don't build up a thesis; I don't want to do that. The "history of science" books I've read tend to be more about Science In All It's Glory, no doubt because I tend to only see the popular books, and big topics sell better than specialized ones. The historiography of science books (Kuhn, Poppler), which I haven't read, seem like they are at too high of a level, and in any case, much of what I'm interested is driven more by engineering goals, like cost reduction, than some sense of scientific truth. I haven't even found a historian who does something like this that I can talk with, though as Haigh points out there are likely good sociological reasons for that.
A tricky thing about coming to history of technology from a technical field is that that historians coming to it from academic history programs will usually be interested in different questions. For example, for an engineer, a simple narrative account of the development of current mirrors to take the place of resistors in IC design may be interesting, but an academic would be more interested in how it illustrated something more general about how creative endeavors by contractors at the periphery of company administrative structure often work well despite administrative oversight ( this is an entirely invented example) . It sounds as though you may be interested in academic questions, and they in your ideas.
You might like to check out the Society for the History of Technology. It has yearly meetings, sometimes in Europe ( I think there may have been one in Uppsala) and there is a Resources page for researchers, teachers, etc.