Jaimie Murdock will discuss his paper, "The Origin of the Origin: Understanding Darwin’s Delay through his Reading Notebooks," which you'll find attached. The pre-print is also available at the following link:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.09944 Background information on the project is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.07175
Summary: There were 21 years between when Darwin first reported the Malthusian insight on natural selection and when The Origin of Species was published in 1859. In the intervening years, Darwin carefully recorded each book that he read in a set of reading notebooks. We reconstructed the contents of this library using digital collections and applied topic modeling to them to discern how Darwin selected the next book to read: was he motivated by deep dives or by massive breadth? We also compared the contents of these texts to the Origin and to several intermediate drafts. The computational models inform historical questions, providing novel evidence to support that Darwin's theory grew from the additional research time and was not held private out of fear of reprisal, but rather continuing to grow in response to newly published materials.