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Erik Peterson, Assistant Professor – History of Science at the University of Alabama presents “Finding the Organism in Computational History of Biology”<\/strong><\/p>\n Thursday October 25, 2018 at 4:25 in Druck 16<\/p>\n Reception at 4PM at the Druckenmiller Sills Lobby, under the large mural.<\/p>\n How do you see changes in a central concept of a science over time? Traditionally, historians of biology examine the texts of a few\u00a0\u201cgreatest hits\u201d\u2014Darwin, Morgan, Pauling, Crick, Jacob & Monod,\u00a0and so on\u2014and infer the turning points. But what if we could survey those far from the centers of disciplinary notoriety?<\/p>\n Erik and his team applied computational text mining methods from Digital Humanities and Digital History to over 30,000 journal articles from 12 journals over the early and mid-20th\u00a0century. Hoping to\u00a0locate changes in the concept of \u201corganism\u201d over the decades,\u00a0what the data showed regarding changing discourse in the life\u00a0sciences, however, was more surprising.<\/p>\n Dr. Peterson has degrees in Biological Anthropology, History, and\u00a0History and Philosophy of Science.\u00a0His recent book,\u00a0The Life Organic: the Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics\u00a0(Pittsburgh, 2017), is more exciting than it sounds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Erik Peterson, Assistant Professor – History of Science at the University of Alabama presents “Finding the Organism in Computational History of Biology” Thursday October 25, 2018 at 4:25 in Druck 16 Reception at 4PM at the Druckenmiller Sills Lobby, … Continue reading