Scholars Awards: The evoText Project

University Of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary The project aims to develop and make broadly accessible a new web-based tool, evoText, which will open new domains of inquiry and collaboration in history and philosophy of science. The scientific literature for many topics is too large for scholars to engage with comprehensively, a type of Big Data challenge in the humanities. Traditional methods in this area require scholars to engage the literature selectively and that inevitably yields an incomplete (and perhaps biased) view of scientific fields. The new web tool being developed will provide a way around these limitations; moreover, it will be publicly accessible via the Internet and its use will be free of charge. In addition, there is very substantial promise that it will have an impact on secondary-level STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. The PI will work through his academic institution to reach out to local secondary schools to explore how evoText can be used in the classroom, including running a workshop for local instructors on the use of evoText. It will also be publicized at conferences relevant to science education, such as the various conferences established by the NSTA. Technical Summary EvoText will supplement traditional approaches to the history and philosophy of science by allowing historians, philosophers, scientists, and others to answer questions that cannot feasibly be answered due to the time it would take to work through millions of pages of text. It can be used to address specific hypotheses about the nature and history of science, and can also serve as a tool for discovery, pointing to salient periods in history or to important concepts whose investigation may be fruitful using advanced textual analyses. During the period of the grant, the investigator will implement many more sophisticated text analysis algorithms. The evoText database currently contains around 450,000 journal articles; during this period, the investigator will greatly expand the database, adding further content from open access journals as well as JSTOR, Nature Publishing Group, and other closed-access journal providers. His eventual goal is to include every article published in the evolutionary sciences, broadly construed, and also be close to comprehensive in related fields of science (like organismic biology and ecology) as well as in general science. This will provide a unique window into the sciences that we are excited to use to study the history and philosophy of biology, asking questions heretofore impossible to answer.