Lecture - How to study the history and communication of science in the Royal Society

How to study the history and communication of science in the Royal Society

A large scale analysis of the linguistic development of scientific writing using information theory. 

Dr. Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Saarland University

Communication of scientific knowledge in written form has a longstanding tradition starting with the first world’s scientific journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1665 published by the visionary editorship of Henry Oldenburg. While the function remained essentially the same, namely to inform the scientific community of the latest discoveries, the journal has undergone significant change over time. We focus on socio-linguistic changes driven by the overarching hypothesis that the linguistic development of scientific writing is characterized by mechanisms of specialization and conventionalization serving to optimize efficiency in communication. To capture this optimization process in our Collaborative Research Center we developed a new approach based on information-theoretic measures, which supports studying variation in language use on a large scale. 

Open to audiences in the humanities, history of science, and computational linguistics.