Toward quantitative epistemology - Reconstructing the long term evolution of science through large scale analysis of science productions – EPIQUE

The evolution of scientific knowledge is directly related to the history of humanity. Document archives and bibliographic sources like the “Web Of Science” or PubMed contain a valuable source for the analysis and reconstruction of this evolution. The proposed project takes as starting point the contributions of D. Chavalarias and J.P. Cointet about the analysis of the dynamicity of evolutive corpora and the automatic construction of “phylomemetic” topic lattices (as an analogy with genealogic trees of natural species). Currently existing tools are limited to the processing of medium sized collections and a non interactive usage. The expected project outcome is situated at the crossroad between Computer science and Social sciences. Our goal is to develop new highly performant tools for building phylomemetic maps of science by exploiting recent technologies for parallelizing tasks and algorithms on complex and voluminous data. These tools are conceived and validated in collaboration with experts in philosophy and history of science over large scientific archives.