What was Theoretical Biology? A Topic-Modelling Analysis of a Multilingual Corpus of Monographs and Journals, 1914-1945

Over the course of the twentieth century, theoretical biology changed beyond all recognition. Although the field today is synonymous with mathematical biology, when it first emerged it had a far more philosophical agenda. Regrettably, this early period of theoretical biology has been almost completely forgotten and its existence is seldom acknowledged—let alone carefully examined. Our aim is to rescue this multilingual corpus of monographs, book series and journal articles from the dustbin of history. Our guiding question is: What did theoretical biology look like in the early 20th century? We utilize LDA topic modelling (after machine translating where necessary), top2vec and document embeddings to create an interactive tool for the exploration of this corpus, which allows analyzing the development of early theoretical biology. Moreover, we calculate mathematization scores for the documents in our corpus to map the field's increasing emphasis on formal modeling.

Ein Beitrag zur 8. Tagung des Verbands "Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum" - DHd 2022 Kulturen des digitalen Gedächtnisses.