ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Biographies and prosopography in the history of science: the Biographical Archive of Italian Scientific Culture

• In Event: The Impact of the Digital Revolution on the History of Science and its Social Implications-1

English Abstract

The paper focuses on presenting an ongoing digital humanities project in the history of science that aims at the construction of a digital open access Biographical Archive of Italian Scientific Culture (ABCSI) and discussing its methodological basis, the possibilities it opens for research and the problem it raises. Led by the ILIESI institute at CNR, Galileo’s Museum in Florence, the Italian Society for the history of Science and the University of Roma 3, the project has produced a provisional list of around 3800 entries. It aims at contributing to the study of Italian science through the biographies of individuals who have produced, applied and disseminated scientific knowledge in different forms and with different roles from the Middle Ages to the present day. The goals are to provide a comprehensive overview of Italian scientific culture and to offer, through biographies and metadata, a tool for the research community interested in these topics from various points of view. I will discuss the choice made for inclusion criteria and the underlying meaning given to the concept of “scientific culture” as well as for the structure of metadata, divided in two main categories: biographical data and content data (disciplines/field of activities and different classes of keywords) hoping to suggest that the digital approach to biographical description of science in its historical development provides an opportunity to analyze scientific practice, its content and its context. Finally, I will discuss a problematic issue, the synchronic mapping and labelling of a diachronically evolving conceptual field, and present some possible approaches.

Author

• Federico Silvestri, ILIESI-CNR