Tuesday 9 December 2025 – Aleksandra Kaye, Malte Vogl (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology), and Raphael Schlattmann (Technische Universität Berlin): Science Across Borders: Text-Mining and Network Analysis Insights into the Polish Diasporic Periodical Press, 1830-1930
This seminar is 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm GMT live on Zoom at https://zoom.us/j/97424109081 later posted to our YouTube channel.
Session chair: James Baker
Abstract: Migration has played a significant role in Polish history during the nineteenth century. So much so that in Polish historiography, the wave of emigration that started after the November Uprising in 1830 and continued until after the January Uprising in 1863 is called Wielka Emigracja [the Great Emigration], due to both its scale and the social standing of those who emigrated. This was followed by a further 3.5 million people leaving Polish lands between 1871 and 1913. While the cultural and political activities of nineteenth-century migrants and their influence on communities within the partitioned Polish territories have garnered considerable scholarly attention, the scientific contributions have been much less studied. In this paper, we argue that analysing the networks connecting scientists and other authors with editors, printers, publishers, and publications can provide insights into the transnational co-creation of scientific knowledge. To reconstruct and analyse these networks, we employ natural language processing methods, including Large Language Models (LLMs) for named entity recognition (NER), relationship extraction, and context-aware entity disambiguation, to structure information from biographical and bibliographic dictionaries, as well as historical periodicals. We ask, which publications and individuals were particularly influential in the circulation of scientific knowledge, broadly defined, produced by Poles abroad? And how did this change over the course of the century, between 1830 and 1930?
