News & Updates

The next Digital HPS Consortium meeting will be held in Berlin in 2018. Further information will be provided through this website as it becomes available.

Learning From Empirical Approaches to HPS
April 6 - 7, 2018
Center for Philosophy of Science
817 Cathedral of Learning
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA USA

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

In recent years, some historians and philosophers of science have taken an empirical turn in their own work, conducting surveys and interviews, embedding themselves in scientific research groups as both observers and participants, designing and conducting new experiments, replicating historically important experiments, and developing computational approaches to questions in the history & philosophy of science. This conference will provide an opportunity to critically engage with the newest methods and results while keeping traditional HPS questions firmly in sight. Applications of empirical methods to philosophical questions in domains such as values in science, science policy, and science communication are also welcome. General themes include but are not limited to: What does HPS learn from interviews and surveys? HPS observers in the lab: how is it different from social science? Which questions in the history and philosophy of science can be answered experimentally? What does the latest in machine learning imply about scientific discovery and hypothesis generation? What are the implications of metrics for meaning similarity for issues such as the incommensurability of theories? What can HPS learn from the science of science?

Keynote Speakers: John Bickle, Nancy Nersessian, Paul Thagard
Submission Deadline: December 18, 2017

Please submit an abstract of no more than 1500 words. Abstracts will be refereed blind and notifications will be sent mid-January, 2018.

Abstract submission is electronic, and must be made through Easy Chair.
Please go to: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=leahps2017

We encourage early career scholars and individuals working on HPS topics in different disciplines to submit to this conference, and we particularly welcome submissions from members of underrepresented groups. To facilitate participation, we can offer a small number of travel subvention awards, to reimburse up to 250 USD of a presenter’s travel costs. When submitting your abstract, please indicate in the PDF if you are interested in being considered for a travel subvention award. Accepted presenters will receive additional instructions for consideration for an award.

Further inquiries may be addressed to David Colaço (djc60@pitt.edu)

The 2014 Digital HPS Consortium Meeting took place from September 1st to the 3rd, in Nancy, France. The event brought together many of the Digital HPS Consortium members to discuss and further Digital HPS projects and methods. The meeting was organized by members of the University of Lorraine including Olivier Bruneau, Pierre Couchet, and Scott Walter. Additionally, Henri-Poincaré Archives (University of Lorraine & CNRS) and the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme Lorraine helped support the meeting.

At the meeting, members of the consortium provided updates on their HPS projects. David Kohn, the Director of the Darwin Manuscripts Project, described the advanced stage of the project, which had digitized, transcribed, and annotated over 30,000 pieces from Darwin's library. Kohn discussed some of the ways the project is bringing new historical aspects into the consciousness of scholars. For example, historians are using the manuscripts to explore relationships such as that between Darwin and his Joseph Hooker, who apparently edited versions of The Origin of Species before it was published.

Manfred Laubichler presented "A Computational Research Systems for the History of Science," discussing how HPS projects can use digital tools to analyze, annotate, and understand historical data. Laubichler argued that these digital methods make research data available to a wider range of scholars.

Kerry Magruder of the University of Oklahoma gave an update on the ongoing work in the OU Libraries, and discussed the importance of open sources for historical projects. Adam Goldstein presented on bibliographies, and Scott Walker discussed scholarly annotation of mathematics with LATexml.

Alison Pearn from Darwin Correspondence Project was also present and engaged in the discussions. And graduate students at Arizona State University Paige Madison and Steve Elliot presented on how digital HPS and humanities organizations can use social media to further missions such as outreach. They also introduced their new social media handbook that details best practices for scholarly organizations to follow when they employ social media, which can be found in our Resources page.

Contact information for the individuals who presented at this meeting, as well as information about their projects, can be found on our Participants page of this website.

Appointed positions at the Meeting:
Steering Committee and Chairs:
Co-chair: Urs Schoepflin (Max Planck Institute)
Co-chair: Scott Walter (The Poincaré Correspondence Project, University of Lorraine)
Co-chair: Manfred Laubichler (Arizona State University)
1. Alison Pearn (Cambridge University)
2. Rick Creath (Arizona State University)
3. David Kohn (Darwin Manuscript Project)
4. Kerry Magruder (Oklahoma University)
5. Scott Weingart (Indiana University)
Recorder:
Paige Madison (Arizona State University)

It was determined that next year's meeting will be hosted by the University of Oklahoma and will be held in Norman, Oklahoma from 11 to 13 March, 2016. Organized by Kerry Magruder, Stephen Weldon and Tara Carlisle, the meeting offers an opportunity for scholars in DHPS to present their publications, tools, and methods, to exchange ideas, and to form and nurture contacts with members of the international DHPS community.

Please direct questions about the meeting to dhps@ou.edu and for information about travel, registration, accommodations, and the workshop, please visit the website: https://ou-lib-hos.atlassian.net/wiki/display/DHPS/Digital+HPS+annual+wo...

Call for Papers: Workshop on Semantic Web for Scientific Heritage (SW4SH)

The first Workshop on Semantic Web for Scientific Heritage will be held in conjunction with the 12th ESWC 2015 Conference on June 1, in Portoroz, Slovenia and will provide a leading international and interdisciplinary forum for disseminating the latest research in the field of Semantic Web for the study of pre-modern scientific texts and of the history of the ideas and their transmission.

Classicists and historians are interested in developing textual databases, in order to gather and explore large amounts of primary source materials. For a long time, they mainly focused on text digitization and markup. They only recently decided to try to explore the possibility of transferring some analytical processes they previously thought incompatible with automation to knowledge engineering systems, thus taking advantage of the growing set of tools and techniques based on the languages and standards of the semantic Web, such as linked data, ontologies, and automated reasoning. On the other hand, Semantic Web researchers are willing to take up more ambitious challenges than those arising in the native context of the Web in terms of anthropological complexity, addressing meta-semantic problems of flexible, pluralist or evolutionary ontologies, sources heterogeneity, hermeneutic and rhetoric dimensions. Thus the opportunity for a fruitful encounter of knowledge engineers with computer-savvy historians and classicists has come. This encounter may be inscribed within the more general context of digital humanities, a research area at the intersection of computing and the humanities disciplines which is gaining an ever-increasing momentum and where the Linked Open Data is playing an increasingly prominent role.

The purpose of the workshop is to provide a forum for discussion about the methodological approaches to the specificity of annotating “scientific” texts (in the wide sense of the term, including disciplines such as history, architecture, or rhetoric), and to support a collaborative reflection, on possible guidelines or specific models for building historical ontologies. The iconographic data, which are also relevant in history of science and arise similar problematic could be addressed as well and offer suggestive insights for a global methodology for diverse media. A key goal of the workshop, focusing on research issues related to pre-modern scientific texts, is to emphasize, through precise projects and up-to-date investigation in digital humanities, the benefit of a multidisciplinary research to create and operate on relevantly structured data. One of the main interests of the very topic of pre-modern historical data management lies in historical semantics, and the opportunity to jointly consider how to identify and express lexical, theoretical and material evolutions. Dealing with historical texts, a major problem is indeed to handle the discrepancy of the historical terminology compared to the modern one, and, in the case of massive, diachronic data, to take into account the contextual and theoretical meaning of words and sentences and their semantics. Papers on ancient and medieval biological science and zoology are particularly welcome.

More information can be found on the attached PDF.