Participation Information

Dear participants in the GAP satellite workshop,

In this satellite workshop, we will rely on Google Colab notebooks. This service is free but requires a Google account, which you can set up in advance. If you already use Google Drive or have a Gmail account, you are all set.

You can find a basic overview of Google Colab here: https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/basic_features_overview.ipynb

If you want to participate without registering for a Google account, you can also use a local Python installation on your own computer. It’s great if you can set this up beforehand, but if you don’t find time for it, we can also figure it out during the workshop.

See again here for the programme: https://maxnoichl.eu/blog/2025/gap_workshop_comp_methods

Participation is open to everyone who is interested.

Best,

Gregor Bös & Max Noichl

Abstract

Computational methods have revolutionized most fields of academic research, including the humanities. More recently, they have also been put to use in the philosophy of science, history of philosophy, and metaphilosophy. In this satellite workshop, we discuss techniques from the digital humanities, network science and artificial intelligence research that can support the study of philosophical corpora.

The workshop comprises two keynote lectures that showcase computational methods in philosophical research. After these showcases, Gregor Bös and Max Noichl assist the participants in developing their own initial research questions that make use of digital methods and explore first implementations. The organizers have prepared templates to support participants without programming experience or who have not yet used computational methods in their research. More experienced participants can use the sessions to exchange ideas and develop their own projects, presenting the state of their progress in the concluding session.

If participants already have project ideas when signing up, we encourage them to get into contact with the organizers to discuss potential data-sources and methods. Participants are also very welcome to sign up to continue working on existing digital projects, and to contribute to the exchange of approaches.

Program

Day 1 (Friday)

09:00 – 09:30: Arrival and coffee.

09:30 – 10:00: Introductions and general remarks.

10:00 – 10:45: Keynote by Catherine Herfeld

10:45 – 11:15: Discussion of Catherine Herfeld’s keynote.

11:15 – 11:30: Short break

11:30 – 12:00: Presentation on network visualization in edhiphy by Gregor Bös

12:00 – 13:30: Lunch break

13:30 – 14:15: Keynote by Adrian Wüthrich.

14:15 – 14:45: Discussion of Adrian Wüthrich’s keynote.

14:45 – 15:00: Short break

15:00 – 15:30: Presentation on OpenAlex Mapper by Max Noichl.

15:30 – 17:00: Guided walkthrough of state-of-the art text-analysis notebooks (different difficulties available).

17:00 – 18:00: Brainstorming session, initiating individual and/or group projects

Day 2 (Saturday)

09:00 – 09:30: Arrival and coffee

9:30 – 12:00: Facilitated project work

12:00 – 13:00: Lunch break

13:00 – 14:00: Continued project work

14:00 – 15:00: Project snapshots and farewell

Talks

Using Network Analysis in Integrated History and Philosophy of Science

Catherine Herfeld (Hannover)

The aim of this talk is to showcase and defend the use of computational methods , particularly network analysis, in Integrated History and Philosophy of Science (&HPS). I will begin by outlining several arguments for why network analysis is generally valuable for &HPS. I will then illustrate by way of discussing some examples how some core questions in &HPS can be addressed through empirical network analysis. I will conclude by raising a few thoughts about the relationship between empirical network analysis and more traditional methods within &HPS.

Computational History and Philosophy of Science

Adrian Wüthrich (TU Berlin)

First, I will provide an overview of some of my research questions in the history and philosophy of science (primarily physics), for which the application of computational tools seemed promising. I will then introduce the tools that my collaborators and I chose to use, and present the outcomes of our investigations. I will also deliberately include attempts which have (so far) not come to fruition. These may help us to develop an understanding of which kinds of research questions can be best tackled with computational tools, and of the difficulties that may arise despite bright prospects. Based on this selection of concrete examples, I will attempt to develop some theoretical reflections on computational history and philosophy of science and address questions such as:

What kinds of tools do we have in mind when we speak of digital or computational tools? Clearly, the simple fact that a computer is used is not a sufficient condition.

What function do computational tools have in our philosophical research workflow exactly? Are they more than just heuristics?

Trust in the tools: Under what conditions are we willing to accept the results of computational methods without verifying them through close reading?

Patterns, pathways & surprises: Introduction to OpenAlex Mapper.

Max Noichl (Utrecht)

Philosophers of science need to be familiar with the object of their study. Part of this familiarity can come from their own scientific training, interviews, and interactions with working scientists, or case studies of historical developments. However, the picture emerging from these localized methods is likely to be incomplete: Modern science is fast, vast, and difficult to grasp in its interdisciplinary entirety. Data-driven methods have emerged in philosophy of science as one way to address this problem. In this paper, I introduce the audience to a new interactive tool that I have built to link philosophical investigations to large corpora of scientific material: OpenAlex Mapper (https://tinyurl.com/OAmapper).

OpenAlex Mapper allows users to project arbitrary search queries to the OpenAlex database (the largest open database of scientific material available) onto an interactively explorable, machine-learning-generated base-map of the sciences. This enables philosophers to quickly check whether hypothesized patterns in the structure, development, and interrelation of scientific fields hold up at scale. As a serendipitous search tool, it also opens the door to exploration of unexpected details and connections.

edhiphy.org: Mention-Networks for the history of analytic philosophy (of science)

Gregor Bös (Tilburg/Leuven)

Presentations of philosophical movements normally have to choose a number of key actors for closer study, while making larger claims about a philosophical environment that consists mostly of forgotten participants. Digital methods can help to take the contributions of these participants into account. But extant bibliometric tools do not generalize well to the history of philosophy in the early 20th Century, as citation standards are much looser than in empirical sciences. This is why a group of historians of philosophy has developed mention-based bibliometry (Petrovich et al., 2024).

Our original application is a study of the reception of logical empiricist philosophers in the United States, based on 22,977 articles in 12 Anglophone philosophy journals published between 1890 and 1980. We can now show how and when Carnap rose to a philosophical dominance that could only compare with Kant’s. We also break down the reception of logical empiricism by institutions, confirming that Columbia University publications remained focused on Dewey while logical empiricist philosophy had become the prime topic in other leading departments. The audience is then referred to the web-application https://edhiphy.org through which our database can be explored further, and from where they can create network graphs and empirical studies for their own domain of expertise.