The Cefises center is pleased to announce this FNRS MIS conference. Our aim in hosting this meeting is to bring together scholars working on two separate trends. First, the products of science themselves have increasingly become digital – from big data produced in laboratory contexts to the increasingly dominant roles of social media and preprints in the dissemination of results. Second, the methods that we use to study those products have also become digitized – scholars including philosophers, historians, linguists, and sociologists have turned to tools like network and citation analysis, textual analysis (and other tools of the digital humanities), and modeling and simulation, in our attempts to understand science and its changes over time. Both of these shifts have made a substantial impact on the epistemic landscape of science, and are in the process of reshaping the philosophy of science in particular and science studies more generally.

What has been lacking, we think, is the opportunity for dialogue between these two groups of researchers. On the one hand, meta-level claims about digital methods in science should equally well apply to cases where these methods are used in the humanities. And conversely, those interested in the epistemic characteristics of these digital methods in general should be able to learn from instances of their application in the humanities as well. We thus hope to put these two groups in dialogue, looking for new insights and modes of research enabled by our digital study of digital scientific products.

The conference will take place, virtually, from March 15–18, 2021. Talks will take place in the afternoon/evening Europe time, or the morning North-America time, spread over four days.

Speakers:

• Katy Börner, Victor H. Yngve Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Information Science, Founding Director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, Indiana University (USA)
• Susan Hunston, Professor of English Language, Department of English Language and Linguistics, University of Birmingham (UK)
• Sabina Leonelli, Professor of Philosophy and History of Science, Co-Director, Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences (Egenis), University of Exeter (UK)
• Christophe Malaterre, Professeur, Département de philosophie, Université du Québec à Montréal (CA)

We believe that the broad interests of our speakers – including expertise in scientometrics, digital humanities, linguistics, history and philosophy of science, and network analysis – perfectly captures the broad and interdisciplinary spirit of the meeting, and we thank all four for their willingness to participate!

The conference chairs,
Charles Pence and Luca Rivelli

Videos of the conference