Digital HPS Summit

By Grant Yamashita

The Digital HPS Initiative Summit on February 26-27, 2010 at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA was organized by ASU's Center for Biology and Society and funded by the National Science Foundation. The Summit brought together major projects and stakeholders in digital history and philosophy of science, including ASU's Embryo Project, the Chymistry of Newton project at Indiana University, the Einstein Papers Project at Cal Tech, the Archimedes Project at Harvard, the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Biology of Aging at the MBL.

The goal of the summit was to map out a detailed plan for a digital infrastructure for the history and philosophy of science community, with the task of preparing a concrete proposal and development plan for this digital infrastructure. The participants identified the need for an HPS "Informatics Bootcamp" to train current and future interested members of the digital HPS community and also identified repositories, data-mining tools, editorial processes, and publication venues as important areas of interest to the community.

Plans for additional workshops focusing on specific areas of interest were made and a draft of a white paper for the community is currently being developed. Additional materials and further information about digital HPS can be found on http://www.digitalhps.org.