Computational Cultural Science Workshop

Seminar organised by PSL Culture Lab, major research programme at the Université Paris Sciences & Lettres with the participation of Matti La Mela, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, researcher at the Uppsala Centre for Business History at Uppsala University, and 2025–2026 fellow at the Paris IAS (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Chair).

Presentation of the event

Following on from the inaugural event of the PSL’s major CultureLab programme, held last September, the first edition of the ‘Computational Cultural Science’ workshop aims to bring together researchers who apply computational methods to the study of cultural artefacts.

Program of the presentation by Matti La Mela

19 May 2026, 14:00 p.m.-14:30 p.m.: Is There a Patent Genre? A Textual Analysis of French Patents, 1903-1940

Patents are legal documents that grant temporary exclusive rights over inventions and describe their technical features. As such, they have become an important source for studying innovation and technological change, including through computational analyses of patent texts. Yet patent applications are not only repositories of technical knowledge, but are also shaped by institutional and linguistic conventions that structure their writing.

This project approaches patents as a rhetorical genre by analysing a corpus of French patent descriptions from 1903–1940. Using computational text analysis, it examines both the stability and variation of patent language—a characteristic feature of genre. First, we analyse the persistence of frequent bigrams over time to identify repeating lexical patterns in patents. Second, we measure lexical differences between patents from different countries filed in France using Jensen–Shannon distance. The results show a stable core of word constructions in patent descriptions. Interestingly, we see differences between patents from different countries, but also persistent closeness by country groups, e.g. between English-language patenting countries. The findings highlight the importance of approaching patents as historically situated textual artefacts.

Practical informations

On-site event, open to the public, registration required.
Further information: https://c2s.sciencesconf.org/

For more informations about the program: https://c2s.sciencesconf.org/data/pages/booklet.pdf