Workshops
From digitalHPS
To date, we have had eight workshops aimed at various aspects of building the cyberinfrastructure discussed in the White Paper. Additional workshops are currently being planned.
April 12-15, 2012; MBL - "Model Organisms and Bioinformatics Workshop"
We hope to develop and refine some bioinformatics tools to inform key debates about the choice of model organisms in developmental biology and neuroscience. Several distinct literatures have arisen in regard to the use and justification of model organisms in biology. These literatures are mainly conceptual in content, reflecting the experiences and perspectives of biologists, historians, and philosophers; a few contributions have an empirical basis, as well. The objectives for this workshop are to enable better conceptual and empirical research, whether the focus is particular animals, questions, research trajectories, or whatever else piques our joint interests.
The workshop will involve hands-on development and application of bioinformatics tools for searching, building timelines, creating and annotating repositories, and facilitating serendipity. If you have any specific ideas for group projects, or questions about model organisms that you need particular tools to be able to answer, please let us know. Further information about this workshop and a formal call for participants will go out in early 2012.
May 23-26, 2011; MBL - "History and Philosophy of Science Informatics Workshop"
NOTE: All seats have been filled for the workshop.
February 26-27, 2011; Caltech - "Digital Editions and the History & Philosophy of Science Online"
Building on previous results of the NSF supported digital HPS consortium and initiative, this workshop brings together scholars and specialists in the areas of digital editions of collected works, digital editions of manuscripts, and digital publishing of scholarly works. The Digital Editing Workshop will review and evaluate current methodologies and practices in the area of digital editions and related issues (such as archiving, oral history, author's rights, digital rights) and develop a roadmap for future development in informatics solutions supporting editing projects. We also will be discussing the sustainability of digital editions and related projects.
This workshop was co-sponsored by the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech and the NSF-funded Embryo Project at Arizona State University and held at Caltech in Pasadena, California.
Topics included:
- Review of previous Digital HPS workshops
- Standards for archiving and storage of documents (paper, digital, images, objects, oral interviews)
- Standards for permissions of digital and print objects, including experiments (copyright issues for archives, estates, publishers, authors)
- Standards for metadata, harvesting technologies and whether some criteria for consistency can be reached across platforms
- Tools for mining data from documents and other objects
- Best practices for implementing network of projects
October 15-16, 2010; MBL - "EP Editorial Workshop"
This workshop is part of the NSF-funded Embryo Project. The Embryo Project Encyclopedia has been established, and is accumulating short entry-level descriptive articles written largely by students. Other objects include photographs, videos, timelines, and archival materials. The next step is to determine whether and how to expand the type of entries and to set up standards and a process for additional entries. This involves consideration about editorial questions per se, and also about the electronic and informatics aspects of publishing the Encyclopedia.
This workshop was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and held at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA.
February 26-27, 2010; MBL - "Digital HPS Initiative Summit"
The Summit recognized that a community of digital projects in the history and philosophy of science requires a number of shared technologies and protocols that will further development of digital projects in the humanities. In order to facilitate this cyberinfrastructure, the Summit agreed that the following be investigated further:
- HPS Informatics Boot Camp
- Repositories and interoperability between them
- Tools for data mining
- Editing procedures of current projects
- Publishing a journal devoted to digital HPS-related issues
September 18-19, 2009; MBL - "ASU-MBL Bioinformatics Workshop"
This workshop is designed to find new ways to build on the Marine Biological Laboratory's emerging strengths in bioinformatics, Arizona State University's projects in which informatics is a crucial part of the research, and the parallel work of partner institutions. The MBL has been instrumental in building new technological and conceptual tools for research in several fields—aging, taxonomy, and biodiversity—while overlapping groups at ASU have been working on digital projects in the history of developmental biology and in history and philosophy of science more generally, as well as in species exploration remote microscopy, e-monography the production of e-types and other aspects of cybertaxonomy.
At this workshop, participants will explore common technical issues and shared solutions, look for opportunities to build their projects collaboratively, and map out new areas for future development. While the MBL is creating new tools for the biology of aging and for biodiversity informatics (Encyclopedia of Life, UBIO, the Biodiversity Heritage Library), overlapping groups of researchers at ASU are building both a community-wide infrastructure for digital history and philosophy of science and a new set of standards for imaging and databasing electronic type specimens.
April 24-25, 2009; MBL - "Woods Hole Digital HPS Workshop"
This site is the result of discussions that occurred at the Woods Hole Digital HPS Workshop from April 24-25, 2009. View the list of projects involved in this consortium.
The workshop's goal was to "establish a workable community wide digital infrastructure for HPS, discuss current existing solutions, draft a plan for an architecture and establish short, medium and long term goals and programming developments."
As a result, we identified four areas that need to be addressed in a community-wide collaborative effort:
- Repositories
- Ontologies
- Tools for discovery and analysis of data
- Dissemination
Based on these areas and continued discussions, we have developed a White Paper outlining the goals, objectives, and processes that we have identified as being necessary components towards a digital HPS cyberinfrastructure.
