Innovation in Text and Data: Between Contextual and Computational approaches to historical industrial property rights

Workshop organised by Matti La Mela (Paris IAS, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Chair, Uppsala University) with the support of the Paris IAS. Open to the public via videoconference, registration required.

This workshop initiates a multidisciplinary discussion around the digitisation and research of historical industrial intellectual property rights, such as patents, trademarks, and design rights, and the distinct textual and visual elements the related documents embody.

As individual artefacts and as entries in large databases, patents and trademarks contain rich information on past technologies, their commercialisation, and the authors involved in these processes, that are approached as quantitative data. At the same time, these documents are not neutral reflections of technical content, but complex sites of knowledge production and representation reflecting a specific legal-administrative genre, that involves multiple actors with distinct intentions such as inventors, patent agents and attorneys, translators, and administrative authorities.

The aim of the workshop is to reflect on the specific form of the industrial property documents, how scientific and technical knowledge is structured, mediated, and interpreted through the formalised genres of patents and trademarks, and on the other hand, their application as “data” for studying various aspects of innovation and technical change.

This seminar will be held over two days, 9 and 10 April, at two separate venues.

Full program

Thursday, 9 April at the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale (4 Place Saint-Germain des Prés, 75006, Paris).

1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.: Session 1, welcome

• Sophia Rishyna (Mannheim Universität) and Marco Martinez (Università di Pisa) - Inventing under Persecution: Jewish Inventors in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy
• Amandine Gabriac (Archives départementales de l’Eure) - Exploring the Patented Inventors of Photography (19th–20th Centuries): Methods, Sources, and Challenges
• Marco Martinez (Università di Pisa), Alessandro Nuvolari (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa), and Michelangelo Vasta (Università di Siena) - Pavitt’s Taxonomy in Historical Perspective: Evidence from Italian Industrialization, 1861-1938
• Alexander Donges (Universität Mannheim) and Jochen Streb (Universität Mannheim) - Industrial Policy and Technological Change in Nazi Germany

4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.: Session 2

• Steeve Gallizia (Institut national de la propriété industrielle) - From 2.5 Kilometers of Paper to a Dataset: Digitizing French Patents, 1791–1901
• Anne Chanteux (Conservatoire national des arts et métiers) - Sources for a history of French women's patents in the 19th century
• Gabriel Galvez-Behar (Université de Lille) - When a Patent Office counts: Patents as statistical data at the French Patent Office, 1950s-1960s

Friday 10 April at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study.

9:15 a.m. - 10:40 a.m.: Session 3

• Yohann Guffroy (Université de Genève) - Thinking About Occupational Health Through Patents: The Case of Respirators (France–England, 19th Century)
• Thomas Preveraud (Université d’Artois) and Loïc Petitgirard (Conservatoire national des arts et métiers) - Shaping mathematical and technical knowledge between academic and legal/industrial contexts (19th century)
• Nicolas Chachereau (EPFL) and Jérôme Baudry (EPFL) - The internationalisation of patent systems: Computational techniques and historical interpretation

11:20 a.m. - 1:15 p.m.: Session 4, concluding words

• Joris Mercelis (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf) - Patents as Indicator of R&D Internationalization? Contextual and Quantitative Evidence on U.S. Multinationals’ Australian Patenting in the Twentieth Century
• Faustine Perrin (Lunds Universitet), Youssouf Merouani (Lunds Universitet), and Marco Martinez (Università di Pisa) - The French Connection: technology transfer and invention between Fin-de-Siècle France and Italy
• Pedro Leitão (Instituto dos Vinhos do Douro e do Porto) - Foreign trademarks in domestic markets. The case of Portugal (1883-1945)
• Yunting Xie (Uppsala Universitet), Matti La Mela (IEA Paris, Uppsala Universitet), and Fredrik Tell (Uppsala Universitet) - Towards a textual understanding of historical patents: the case of Sweden and France

Conditions of participation

Open to the public via videoconference. For any requests to participate or for information about the event or topic, please contact Matti La Mela by email: matti.lamela@abm.uu.se

Organizers and funders

This workshop is funded by the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Organised by Matti La Mela (Paris IAS, Uppsala University), Liliane Hilaire-Perez (Université Paris Cité, EHESS), Jérôme Baudry (EPFL) and Nicolas Chachereau (EPFL).