Article ID: CBB244630894

Building Infrastructure in the Digital Age: Case Study of the Isis Bibliography of History of Science, 2002-2018 (2018)

unapi

The IsisCB Explore went online in 2015 as a foundational digital resource for historians of science. Built on the History of Science Society’s 100-year-old Isis Bibliography of the History of Science, this service is meant to lay the groundwork for a digital infrastructure to support historical work in the relatively new digital environment where so much modern scholarship now takes place. In order to create this resource, the director of the project, Stephen Weldon, has learned how to shape traditional historical methods, practices, and resources to fit the new digital paradigm. Computer and networking technologies have been built out of the needs and practices of technologists, natural scientists, and business innovators, all of whom employ it in very specific ways, quite different from the practices of humanistic scholarship, and history in particular. As a result, the digital environment is not especially friendly to historical work or products. As a result, it has taken a great deal of effort to understand and refactor historical data so that it functions well within a digital knowledge ecology, a “knowledge infrastructure,” as Christine Borgman refers to it. This paper describes the difficulties (epistemological, cultural, and economic) that make the creation of tools like the IsisCB Explore service challenging for historians and suggests some ways forward.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB244630894/

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Authors & Contributors
Weldon, Stephen P.
Abbott, Andrew
Alfonso-Goldfarb, Ana Maria
Burman, Jeremy Trevelyan
Chamberlin, D. D.
Ferraz, Marcia Helena Mendes
Journals
Circumscribere: International Journal for the History of Science
History of Psychology
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Social Studies of Science
Acta Baltica historiae et philosophiae scientiarum
Publishers
University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago
University of Nebraska Press
Concepts
Databases
Data collection
Digital humanities
Relational databases; management
Big data
Bibliographies
People
Sarton, George
Codd, E. F.
Neu, John
Whitrow, Magda
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
20th century, early
Places
Great Britain
Europe
Institutions
History of Science Society
International Business Machines Corporation
European Commission
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