Philosophical Transactions Extractions Viewer

An interactive browser for LLM-extracted structured data from 77 articles marked as 'Experiment' in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1665–1886).

Part of the Secrets to Patent project.

🌐 Live site: https://digitalhistory-lund.github.io/SecToPat-PhilTransExtractions/

What's here

| Path | Purpose | | --- | --- | | index.html | Self-contained viewer with all extraction data embedded | | about.html | About page with citation and license info |

What it shows

Each article is classified as an experiment (yes / no / unsure) and structured data is extracted: experiment descriptions, locations mentioned, and participants. The viewer lets you filter by classification and browse article by article alongside the original OCR'd text.

The HTML is generated by build_extractions_viewer.py in the parent repository from data/extractions/article.extract.json files produced by the extraction pipeline.

Prompt

Each article was passed to the LLM with the following prompt:

You are analysing an article from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
(17th–19th century). Answer three questions:

1. is_experiment: Does this article describe one or more experiments or systematic
observations? Answer "yes", "no", or "unsure".

2. locations: List every spatial location where an experiment or observation took place.
For each, provide:
   - place: the immediate setting at room or building scale (e.g. "private study",
"ship's cabin", "kitchen"); null if not mentioned
   - geography: named place at city, region, country, estate, or vessel scale
(e.g. "London", "aboard HMS Endeavour"); null if not mentioned
   - detail: specific spatial detail within the place (e.g. "by the south window",
"in a dark corner"); null if not mentioned
Do not include apparatus or containers as locations. Return an empty list if no
spatial setting is mentioned.

3. participants: List every person named in the article who conducted, observed, or
contributed to the experiment or observation. For each, provide:
   - name: the person's name as it appears in the text
   - role: their role if stated (e.g. "experimenter", "observer", "subject",
"correspondent", "author"); null if not clear
Return an empty list if no individuals are named.

Structured output was enforced via JSON schema using the Ollama API.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). See LICENSE.

Citation

Machine-readable metadata is in CITATION.cff.

Contact

For questions or feedback, contact Mathias Johansson at MathiasJohansson@kultur.lu.se, or open an issue.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/DigitalHistory-Lund/SecToPat-PhilTransExtractions/commits/v0.1.0