The Papyrus Digital Library: Discovering History in the News

Abstract. Digital archives comprise a valuable asset for effective information retrieval. In many cases, however, the special vocabulary of the archive restricts its access only to experts in the domain of the material it contains and, as a result, researchers of other disciplines or the general public cannot take full advantage of the wealth of information it offers. To this end, the Papyrus research project has worked towards a solution which makes cross-discipline search possible in digital libraries. The developed prototype showcases this approach demonstrating how we can discover history in news archives. In this demo we focus on demonstrating two of the end user tools available in the prototype, the cross-discipline search and the Papyrus browser

On the Hazardousness of the Concept ‘Technology’: Notes on a Conversation Between the History of Science and the History of Technology

Historians of science and historians of technology have recently turned their attention to the conceptual history of ‘applied science’ and ‘technology’ respectively. ‘Technology’ was a concept introduced in the nineteenth century as concerning both ‘applied science’ and ‘industrial arts.’ A developed version of this concept caught on after the first decades of the twentieth century, following the establishment of technological networks and the rise of ‘Fordism,’ ‘Taylorism’ and ‘technocracy.’ Based on interpretations of the nineteenth-century circuit of the steam engine and the twentieth-century network of electric power, this chapter brings together observations from the history of science, the history of technology and the critique of classic political economy to elaborate on the suggestion that ‘technology’ has been a ‘hazardous’ concept. Central to the argument of the chapter is the retrieval of a correspondence between the conceptual couples ‘technology’-‘technics’ and ‘surplus value’-‘value.’ © 2015, Springer International Publishing Switzerland