Mapping the International Congresses
Documentation of the history of the international history of science community begins with locating all of its congresses since the first one, which took place in Paris in 1929.
Read moreThree Almost Invisible Women
(Or, What You Can See in a Word Cloud) By Stephen P. Weldon Last week while talking to my staff about what to include in a major revamp of the website, it became clear that we could do something very interesting with the thesaurus. Several years ago, I posted a list of the 23,000+ terms (subjects, persons, institutions, and place […]
Read moreThe IsisCB Sponsors THATCamp at HSS Meeting in Chicago
By Stephen P. Weldon I would like to invite historians of science who are coming to the History of Science Society meeting this fall in Chicago to consider attending THATCamp HSS 2014, a day-long open space meeting revolving around digital projects in the humanities, especially history of science. People of all skill levels are encouraged to attend. (Please register early […]
Read moreTaking the CB away from Humans and Giving It to Computers
By Sylwester Ratowt What makes today’s internet so different from the original web of the 90s is that, rather than writing webpages by hand, developers often write applications that create the webpages automatically based on data found at other internet locations. Consider the Digital Public Library of America, for example, which features browse by place and browse by date interfaces. […]
Read moreDigitizing the Cumulative Bibliography
By Stephen P. Weldon Over the next couple of years, one of the goals of this blog will be to document the efforts that I and others are taking to build the Isis Platform I discussed in my last post. I do this in part to show how a project of this sort gets built and to highlight the work […]
Read moreAlfred P. Sloan Foundation Awards Grant to Develop the Isis Bibliography
Last month, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced their support to fund the project that I’ve been discussing in this blog and elsewhere over the past year. The idea is to reconceptualize the Isis Bibliography for scholars in the twenty-first century. The Isis Research Platform will create a new type of access to history of science scholarship and to the […]
Read moreDocumenting History of Science on the Web
This week, I take a brief look at a few sites that seem to herald the future of documentation in the digital environment. My earlier post about the World History of Science Online ended with a comment about the need to index digital resources. Behind that comment was a general concern about the role of scholars in indexing and documenting […]
Read moreVisualizing History of Science
The other day, I was looking through the book Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know (MIT Press, 2010) by Katy Börner, a fascinating big-data look at science for historians. It gave me the idea of playing around with visualizations of my own using the Isis Bibliography data. What I’ve produced here are quite unsophisticated by comparison, but they raise […]
Read moreOrdering the Discipline
This past week the journal Isis published a symposium that I organized entitled “Ordering the Discipline: Classification in the History of Science.” The five articles in this symposium are all part of the Focus Section, which you can access through the Isis table of contents. By a standing agreement with the History of Science Society, the University of Chicago Press […]
Read moreThe World History of Science Online
Many of you know that in addition to editing the Isis Bibliography, I am also chair of the World History of Science Online (WHSO). This project is designed to help scholars find digital resources in the history of science. It was started a decade ago at an expert meeting in Paris. I recently wrote a brief history of this organization, […]
Read more