Abstract

As debates on patents covering COVID-19 vaccines have recalled, intellectual property rights are of great relevance on a global scale. Our ongoing research project “The Internationalization of Patent Systems: From Patent Cultures to Global Intellectual Property” investigates how patents have been transformed, albeit incompletely, from a local instrument for protecting innovation to such global intellectual property rights. This presentation will discuss how digital methods help scrutinize the history of this internationalization in new ways, complementing the study of intergovernmental agreements. Combining a large corpus of digitized patents (around 4 millions documents) with textual analysis and computer vision techniques allows us to explore the networks of texts and images emerging from border-crossing patenting practice. In the presentation, we will focus on the challenges of applying these techniques on our corpus, on the choices made in response to these challenges, on their methodological implications, and on the new insights that this process brings about.
 

Speakers

Jérôme Baudry is a historian of science and technology. Since 2019, he is a tenure-track assistant professor at EPFL, where he heads the Laboratory for the History of Science and Technology (LHST) and manages the UNIL-EPFL Collection of Scientific Instruments. He studied history, mathematics, sociology and economics in Paris, before receiving a PhD in the history of science at Harvard University. His research interests include the history of intellectual property, the role of the visual in science and technology, and the history and sociology of public participation in science. He is particularly interested in developing and experimenting with new tools and methods — especially digital and computational — for historical research.

Nicolas Chachereau is an Assistent (postdoc) at the History Department, University of Basel, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for the History of Science and Technology, EPFL. His research interests are situated at the intersection of the history of technology, of the economy, and of politics/policy. In particular, he investigates the history of patents and the history of energy, and more specifically of oil, often combining archival research with methods of digital history.