Digital History of Science

Anna Guerrero, Marine Biological Laboratory and American Philosophical Society
Anna Guerrero is a PhD candidate in the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University. She’s usually studying history and philosophy of images in science, with a specific interest in fields that deal with entities invisible to the naked eye (like microbes). In this talk, she discusses how computational methods, particularly turning publication metadata and abstracts into networks (co-author, co-citation, keyword co-occurance) with VoS Viewer, can be used to investigate historical questions about the influence of scientists and their ideas. She will present these methods, the data they can produce, and the problems they can help solve through a case study investigating the influence of Günter Blobel and his idea of “protein topogenesis.”