The Ingenious Crowd�: A Critical Prosopography of British Inventors, 1650-1850

simulation, models

On Making in the Digital Humanities

On Making in the Digital Humanities fills a gap in our understanding of digital humanities projects and craft by exploring the processes of making as much as the products that arise from it. The volume draws focus to the interwoven layers of human and technological textures that constitute digital humanities scholarship. To do this, it assembles a group of well-known, experienced and emerging scholars in the digital humanities to reflect on various forms of making (we privilege here the creative and applied side of the digital humanities). The volume honours the work of John Bradley, as it is totemic of a practice of making that is deeply informed by critical perspectives. A special chapter also honours the profound contributions that this volume’s co-editor, Stéfan Sinclair, made to the creative, applied and intellectual praxis of making and the digital humanities. Stéfan Sinclair passed away on 6 August 2020. The chapters gathered here are individually important, but together provide a very human view on what it is to do the digital humanities, in the past, present and future. This book will accordingly be of interest to researchers, teachers and students of the digital humanities; creative humanities, including maker spaces and culture; information studies; the history of computing and technology; and the history of science and the humanities

Inventive Activities, Patents and Early Industrialization. A Synthesis of Research Issues

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of recent research on the role of patent systems in the early phases of industrialization. Perhaps surprisingly, no consensus has been reached yet as to whether the emergence of modern patent systems exerted a favourable impact on inventive activities. However, the recent literature has shed light on a number of fundamental factors which affect the links between inventive activities and the patent system. The concluding section of the paper outlines some "history lessons" for the current debate on the role of Intellectual Property Rights in economic development.

Toward a New Collective Biography: The University of British Columbia Professoriate, 1915–1945

Collective biography traditionally relies on quantitative evidence to explain social and economic characteristics of a group of persons. A recent and continuing study of the professoriate at the University of British Columbia between 1915 and 1945 shows that this historical method could and should take into account the intellectual and emotional circumstances of its subjects, rather than rely exclusively on socio-economic data. The UBC study uses several techniques that connect quantitative and circumstantial data in a single, integrated historical argument. La biographie collective repose généralement sur des données quantitatives pour expliquer les caractéristiques sociales et économiques d’un groupe de personnes. Une étude récente, et toujours en cours, du corps professoral à l’University of British Columbia entre 1915 et 1945 indique que cette méthode historique pourrait et devrait prendre en compte le contexte intellectuel et affectif dans lequel se trouvent les sujets, plutôt que de s’en tenir exclusivement aux données socio-économiques. L’étude de l’UBC fait appel à plusieurs techniques qui établissent des liens entre les données quantitatives et contextuelles dans une interprétation historique intégrée.

"The ingenious crowd" : a critical prosopography of British inventors, 1650-1850

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Information technology in humanities scholarship: British achievements, prospects and barriers

Der vorliegende Beitrag resümiert die Ergebnisse eines gemeinsamen Projekts der Britischen Akademie und der Forschungsabteilung der Britischen Bibliothek zur Anwendung von Informationstechnologien in den Humanwissenschaften. Diskutiert werden Probleme der Informationssammlung, -aufbereitung, - speicherung und -wiedergewinnung im Zusammenhang mit den neuesten Möglichkeiten der elektronischen Datenverarbeitung und der Telekommunikation. Der zweite Abschnitt gibt einen knappen Überblick über den Einfluß der neuen Medien (Text, quantitative Daten, Ton, Bild und elektronische Kommunikation) auf die Forschungstechniken selbst und das traditionelle Selbstverständnis der Humanwissenschaften. Abschließend wird auf organisatorische Fragen wie Aus- und Weiterbildung des Personals, maschinelle Ausrüstung,- Zugang zu Netzwerken und die rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen des 'information handling' eingegangen. (pmb)'The British Academy and the British Library Research convened the Humanities Information Review Panel in April 1990. The Panel's brief was to examine all aspects of the generation, storage, and use of information in the humanities, and to look especially at the new methods of handling information provided by the use of computers, telecommunications, and other associated technologies. Section two of this concise report outlines the impact of new technology on scholarship (text, data, images, sound, combined sources, electronic communication, tools); section three discusses new developments and the change of the traditional image of the humanities scholar; section four describes training and support, network access and equipment, research infrastructure, information ressources, regulatory issues and funding; section five summarises the recommendations of the Panel.' (author's abstract

Aspects of Application of Neural Recognition to Digital Editions

Artificial neuronal networks (ANN) are widely used in software systems which require solutions to problems without a traditional algorithmic approach, like in character recognition: ANN learn by example, so that they require a consistent and well-chosen set of samples to be trained to recognize their patterns. The network is taught to react with high activity in some of its output neurons whenever an input sample belonging to a specified class (e.g. a letter shape) is presented, and has the ability to assess the similarity of samples never encountered before by any of these models. Typical OCR applications thus require a significant amount of preprocessing for such samples, like resizing images and removing all the "noise" data, letting the letter contours emerge clearly from the background. Furthermore, usually a huge number of samples is required to effectively train a network to recognize a character against all the others. This may represent an issue for palaeographical applications because of the relatively low quantity and high complexity of digital samples available, and poses even more problems when our aim is detecting subtle differences (e.g. the special shape of a specific letter from a well-defined period and scriptorium). It would be probably wiser for scholars to define some guidelines for extracting from samples the features defined as most relevant according to their purposes, and let the network deal with just a subset of the overwhelming amount of detailed nuances available. ANN are no magic, and it is always the careful judgement of scholars to provide a theoretical foundation for any computer-based tool they might want to use to help them solve their problems: we can easily illustrate this point with samples drawn from any other application of IT to humanities. Just as we can expect no magic in detecting alliterations in a text if we simply feed a system with a collection of letters, we can no more claim that a neural recognition system might be able to perform well with a relatively small sample where each shape is fed as it is, without instructing the system about the features scholars define as relevant. Even before ANN implementations, it is exactly this theoretical background which must be put to the test when planning such systems

The Biographical Formula: Types and Dimensions of Biographical Networks

Behind every printed national biography is a board of editors responsible for finding established scholars to write the biographies. The personal and institutional networks, the scientific and ideological socialization of these authors have a significant influence on the biographical constructs and narratives they have designed, and thus also determines the information contained in the biographies. Therefore, a source-critical approach to such biography texts is necessary. This will be exemplified using a biography selected from the Austrian Biographical Dictionary 1815–1950 (ÖBL). A complementary approach for the interpretation of biographical dictionaries is analysis of the networks, which can be reconstructed on the basis of the information contained in the biographies. As part of the APIS project, biographical data is generated through the annotation of biographies of the ÖBL. This data consists of frequently mentioned names of persons, places and institutions that can be subsumed under the term “biographical building blocks”. Biographical networks can be built on the basis of this data. In the second part of the paper, different dimensions of these networks as well as ways of analyzing this type of data will be shown