Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-2lccl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T20:58:45.041Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

How to Do Digital Philosophy of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Charles H. Pence  and
Grant Ramsey
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Philosophy of science is expanding via the introduction of new digital data and tools for their analysis. The data comprise digitized published books and journal articles, as well as heretofore unpublished material such as images, archival text, notebooks, meeting notes, and programs. The growth in available data is matched by the extensive development of automated analysis tools. The variety of data sources and tools can be overwhelming. In this article, we survey the state of digital work in the philosophy of science, showing what kinds of questions can be answered and how one can go about answering them.

Type
Methods in Philosophy of Science
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 85 , Issue 5 , December 2018 , pp. 930 - 941
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

This article was presented at the 2016 Philosophy of Science Association biennial meeting. We thank the symposium members and the audience for their thoughtful feedback.

References

Bastian, Mathieu, Heymann, Sebastian, and Jacomy, Mathieu. 2009. “Gephi: An Open Source Software for Exploring and Manipulating Networks.” In Third International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 361–62. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI.Google Scholar
Beccaloni, George. 2008. “The Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project.” http://wallaceletters.info.Google Scholar
Blondel, Vincent D., Guillaume, Jean-Loup, Lambiotte, Renaud, and Lefebvre, Etienne. 2008. “Fast Unfolding of Communities in Large Networks.” Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment. doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2008/10/P10008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brants, Thorsten, and Franz, Alex. 2006. The Google Web 1T 5-Gram Corpus. Version 1.1 (LDC2006T13). Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Buckner, Cameron, Niepert, Mathias, and Allen, Colin. 2007. “InPhO: The Indiana Philosophy Ontology.” APA Newsletter 7 (1): 26–28..Google Scholar
Burns, John, Brenner, Alan, Kiser, Keith, Krot, Michael, Llewellyn, Clare, and Snyder, Ronald. 2009. “JSTOR: Data for Research.” In Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, 416–19. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5714. Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar
Cohen, Aaron M., and Hersh, William R.. 2005. “A Survey of Current Work in Biomedical Text Mining.” Briefings in Bioinformatics 6 (1): 57–71..CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cohen, Dan. 2008. “Introducing Omeka.” http://hdl.handle.net/1920/6089.Google Scholar
Dombrowski, Quinn. 2014. “What Ever Happened to Project Bamboo?” Literary and Linguistic Computing 29 (3): 326–39..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elsevier. 2014. “Text and Data Mining.” https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/text-and-data-mining.Google Scholar
Gwinn, Nancy E., and Rinaldo, Constance. 2009. “The Biodiversity Heritage Library: Sharing Biodiversity Literature with the World.” IFLA Journal 35 (1): 25–34..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoover, David L. 2012. “Textual Analysis.” In Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology. New York: Modern Language Association. http://dlsanthology.commons.mla.org/textual-analysis/.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ide, Nancy, and Véronis, Jean, eds. 1995. Text Encoding Initiative: Background and Context. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iliffe, Rob, and Mandelbrote, Scott. 1998. “The Newton Project.” http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/.Google Scholar
Ioannidis, John P. A. 2005. “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” PLoS Medicine 2 (8): e124.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jockers, Matthew. 2014. Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature. Cham: Springer.Google Scholar
Koppel, Moshe, Schler, Jonathan, and Argamon, Shlomo. 2009. “Computational Methods in Authorship Attribution.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60 (1): 9–26..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kraker, Peter, Lex, Elisabeth, Gorraiz, Juan, Gumpenberger, Christian, and Peters, Isabella. 2015. “Research Data Explored II: The Anatomy and Reception of Figshare.” Cornell University Library. http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.01298.Google Scholar
Maienschein, Jane, Laubichler, Manfred D., Ranney, Jessica, MacCord, Kate, Elliott, Steve, and Colonna, Federica Turriziani. 2007. “The Embryo Project Encyclopedia.” https://embryo.asu.edu.Google Scholar
Manning, Christopher D., Surdeanu, Mihai, Bauer, John, Finkel, Jenny, Bethard, Steven J., and McClosky, David. 2014. “The Stanford CoreNLP Natural Language Processing Toolkit.” In Proceedings of 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, 55–60. Baltimore: Association for Computational Linguistics.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mendelsson, Dalia. 2003. “Einstein Archives Online.” http://www.alberteinstein.info.Google Scholar
Michel, Jean-Baptiste, et al. 2011. “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” Science 331 (6014): 176–82..CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Michener, William K. 2015. “Ten Simple Rules for Creating a Good Data Management Plan.” PLoS Computational Biology 11 (10): e1004525.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Miller, B. A., Beard, M. S., Laubichler, M. D., and Bliss, N. T.. 2015. “Temporal and Multi-Source Fusion for Detection of Innovation in Collaboration Networks.” In 2015 18th International Conference on Information Fusion (Fusion), 659–65. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE.Google Scholar
Mills, Virginia. 2011. “The Joseph Dalton Hooker Project.” University of Sussex. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/research/josephhooker.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. 2013. Distant Reading. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Morse-Gagné, Elise E. 2011. “Culturomics: Statistical Traps Muddy the Data.” Science 332:35–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Munafò, Marcus R., Nosek, Brian A., Bishop, Dorothy V. M., Button, Katherine S., Chambers, Christopher D., du Sert, Nathalie Percie, Simonsohn, Uri, Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan, Ware, Jennifer J., and Ioannidis, John P. A.. 2017. “A Manifesto for Reproducible Science.” Nature Human Behaviour 1, article 21. doi:10.1038/s41562-016-0021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murdock, Jaimie, Allen, Colin, and DeDeo, Simon. 2017. “Exploration and Exploitation of Victorian Science in Darwin’s Reading Notebooks.” Cognition 159:117–26.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pechenick, Eitan Adam, Danforth, Christopher M., and Dodds, Peter Sheridan. 2015. “Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution.” PLoS ONE 10 (10): e0137041.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pence, Charles H. 2011. “‘Describing Our Whole Experience’: The Statistical Philosophies of W. F. R. Weldon and Karl Pearson.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (4): 475–85..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pence, Charles H. 2016. “RLetters: A Web-Based Application for Text Analysis of Journal Articles.” PLoS ONE 11 (1): e0146004.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pence, Charles H. Forthcoming. “How Not to Fight about Theory: The Debate between Biometry and Mendelism in Nature, 1890–1915.” In The Dynamics of Science: Computational Frontiers in History and Philosophy of Science, ed. G. Ramsey and A. De Block. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Pouyllau, Stephane, Blondel, Christine, Wronecki, Marie-Helene, Wolff, Bertrand, and Usal, Delphine. 2005. “Ampère et l’histoire de l’électricité.” http://www.ampere.cnrs.fr.Google Scholar
Team, R Core. 2017. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Ramsey, Grant, and Pence, Charles H.. 2016. “evoText: A New Tool for Analyzing the Biological Sciences.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 57:83–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roberts, Richard J. 2001. “PubMed Central: The GenBank of the Published Literature.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 (2): 381–82..CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Secord, James. 1974. “The Darwin Correspondence Project.” http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk.Google Scholar
Walter, S. A., Nabonnand, Ph., and Rollet, L.. 2002. “Henri Poincaré Papers.” http://henripoincarepapers.univ-nantes.fr.Google Scholar
Whye, John van. 2002. “Darwin Online.” http://darwin-online.org.uk/.Google Scholar
York, Jeremy. 2009. “This Library Never Forgets: Preservation, Cooperation, and the Making of HathiTrust Digital Library.” Archiving Conference 2009 (1): 5–10..Google Scholar