Professional Dev Fellowship: Using informatics to advance history and philosophy of science research

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The project is designed to address simultaneously the need of acquiring additional professional experience in informatics in order to advance research in the history and philosophy of science (HPS) and to open up new areas of research and investigation at the intersection of these two areas. As more and more texts, images, and archival sources become available in digital form, history and philosophy of science, and the humanities more generally, are now experiencing a transformation similar to the life sciences during the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. While these trends are inevitable, researchers in these areas are ill-prepared to take advantage of the new opportunities or to shape the future development of relevant parts of the emerging new cyberinfrastructure. The post-doc's training in biology and HPS, as well as his work on the NSF funded Embryo Project, has given him a unique perspective on the possibilities and challenges of the upcoming digital era in HPS. With the fellowship he will spend time training with computer scientists and informaticians at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, as well as the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He will acquire new skills related to developing this cyberinfrastructure, which will then be tested and implemented in the context of the Embryo Project. This professional training fellowship will go beyond supporting research in HPS as the tools and techniques developed will contribute substantially to the digital humanities at large. Presenting HPS related results and information to a multitude of different user groups has enormous educational and outreach possibilities as well, and this depends on a substantially developed cyber-infrastructure to deliver this scholarly content to students, policy makers, judges, and the interested public.