Quantitative Perspectives on Fifty Years of the Journal of the History of Biology

Journal of the History of Biology provides a fifty-year long record for examining the evolution of the history of biology as a scholarly discipline. In this paper, we present a new dataset and preliminary quantitative analysis of the thematic content of JHB from the perspectives of geography, organisms, and thematic fields. The geographic diversity of authors whose work appears in JHB has increased steadily since 1968, but the geographic coverage of the content of JHB articles remains strongly lopsided toward the United States, United Kingdom, and western Europe and has diversified much less dramatically over time. The taxonomic diversity of organisms discussed in JHB increased steadily between 1968 and the late 1990s but declined in later years, mirroring broader patterns of diversification previously reported in the biomedical research literature. Finally, we used a combination of topic modeling and nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques to develop a model of multi-article fields within JHB. We found evidence for directional changes in the representation of fields on multiple scales. The diversity of JHB with regard to the representation of thematic fields has increased overall, with most of that diversification occurring in recent years. Drawing on the dataset generated in the course of this analysis, as well as web services in the emerging digital history and philosophy of science ecosystem, we have developed an interactive web platform for exploring the content of JHB, and we provide a brief overview of the platform in this article. As a whole, the data and analyses presented here provide a starting-place for further critical reflection on the evolution of the history of biology over the past half-century.Comment: 45 pages, 14 figures, 4 table

Conceptpower-API: conceptpower-api v1.0

<p>A very simple library for querying a Conceptpower REST API.</p

Software development & trans-disciplinary training at the interface of digital humanities and computer science

The computational turn in the humanities has precipitated the need for sustainable software development projects that are specifically focused on humanities research problems, and the need for graduate and undergraduate training models that address the trans-disciplinary nature of computational humanities research. In this paper, we describe one approach for addressing those two challenges simultaneously: an interdisciplinary research and development team called the Digital Innovation Group (DigInG). DigInG quickly and necessarily became an experiment in trans-disciplinary education at the interface of digital humanities and computer science. Not only does DigInG play an important role in developing a computational infrastructure for d/cHPS research, it also creates an environment for hands-on training for graduate and undergraduate students in computer science, biology, and history and philosophy of science. We discuss the rationale, benefits, and challenges of DigInG since its inception. Our primary objectives are to broaden the discussion about how digital and computational humanities programs are organized, and to suggest that software development and training in the digital humanities need not be conceived as independent activities. Le tournant informatique en sciences humaines a rendu impératif le besoin de projets durables en matière de développement de logiciels, spécifiquement axés sur les problèmes de recherche en sciences humaines et le besoin de modèles de formation des étudiants de premier cycle et des diplômés, qui abordent la nature transdisciplinaire de la recherche informatique en sciences humaines. Dans cet article, nous décrivons une méthode visant à aborder ces deux défis de façon simultanée : une équipe interdisciplinaire en recherche et développement appelée Digital Innovation Group (DigInG). DigInG est devenu rapidement et nécessairement une expérience en éducation transdisciplinaire à l'interface des sciences humaines numériques et de la science informatique. Non seulement DigInG joue-t-il un rôle important dans le développement d'une infrastructure informatique pour la recherche d/cHPS, il crée aussi un environnement de formation pratique pour les étudiants de premier cycle et diplômés en sciences informatiques, en biologie et en histoire et philosophie des sciences. Nous discutons de la justification, des avantages et des défis de DigInG depuis sa création. Nos principaux objectifs sont d'élargir la discussion à propos de la façon dont les programmes numériques et informatiques sont organisés, et de suggérer que le développement de logiciels et la formation en sciences humaines numériques n'ont pas nécessairement besoin d'être conçus comme des activités indépendantes l'une de l'autre