MetSem #53 – Transnational and translational innovation: ML/AI for digitising and analysing historical patents and their language

Presentation by Matti La Mela, Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at the ALM Department and researcher at the Uppsala Centre for Business History at Uppsala University, and 2025-2026 research-fellow at the Paris IAS (Riksbankens Jubileumsfund Research Chair) during the 53rd session of MetSem at Sciences Po Paris.

Event in English, on-site and online. 
Registration required (deadline before the day of the event) via the link below.

Presentation

Matti La Mela's presentation will focus on his research work this year at the Paris IAS and, more broadly, on his research in digital humanities at Uppsala University. This presentation introduces research using AI and computational methods to investigate the history of innovation in the project “Transnational innovation: A computational study of linguistic change and co-creation in France and Sweden during the Second Industrial Revolution” (Paris IAS), and more broadly within the Uppsala Patent History Group (UPHG). The “Transnational Innovation” project analyses the emergence and circulation of new and significant technical knowledge through historical patents. Methodologically, the aim is to improve both NLP and LLM-guided approaches, which are used to study similarity (and dissimilarity) between patents in a historical and bilingual setting. I discuss also methodological insights regarding the digitisation and curation of patent data in UPHG. We apply multimodal language models to digitise and extract information from historical sources. We use an approach of error flagging through multimodality, which allows to control the quality of digitisation with human interventions.

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