ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Impact of the Digital Revolution on the History of Science and its Social Implications-2

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The digital revolution has significantly reshaped society, the economy, and the academic landscape, including research in the history of science. Digitalization has enabled the construction of large-scale, web-based infrastructures containing vast quantities of structured texts, images, and data. Traditional scholarly editions have increasingly been supplemented or replaced by collaborative digital editions that follow established standards, integrate multimodal sources, and support advanced forms of annotation and interoperability.
Since the emergence of the Digital Humanities (DH) in the late 1990s, the field has progressed from text encoding and the consolidation of TEI standards to data modeling, computational text analysis, historical network research, GIS-based spatial history, and semantic web technologies that link datasets and authority information across repositories. Visualization tools now allow complex representations of time, space, and intellectual networks. Virtually all these methods depend on the digitization of sources and the automated transcription of printed or handwritten materials to generate machine-readable corpora, usually developed and maintained by research software engineers. While these approaches have introduced empirical, data-driven research paradigms, they also raise concerns about sustainability, long-term preservation, and interoperability, and have prompted debates over their relation to traditional hermeneutic scholarship.
The latest and potentially most transformative development concerns Artificial Intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs) and generative systems. These technologies support tasks such as automatic transcription, named-entity recognition, translation, and the identification of correspondence networks or conceptual relationships.
The symposium will highlight projects exemplifying the mentioned opportunities and challenges of the digital turn in the history of science, with an emphasis on recent AI-driven approaches. It will further address the epistemological and ethical implications of these developments and AIs broader impact on society.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Erwin Neuenschwander, Institute of Mathematics University of Zurich

Individual Presentations

• Natural Sciences and Electronic Enlightenment: Addressing the Digital Divide in Archives - Nicole Barbara Pohl, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

• Extrapolating Hidden Histories of Reading: The Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830 Database - Katie Halsey, University of Stirling; Matthew Sangster, University of Glasgow

• Bridging Botany – The Edition of Haller’s Swiss flora on République des Lettres as a Cross-Disciplinary Resource - Lukas Heinzmann, University of Bern

• Using LLMs and AI to visualise the voices and shifts in the History of Thought: From Scholasticism to Empricism to AI and Singularity - Gerold Schneider, University of Zurich

Session Organizer

• Erwin Neuenschwander, Institute of Mathematics University of Zurich