DH4PMP: Digital Humanities for Philosophy of Mathematical Practice

Project

This project aims to research and develop ways for machine learning and big data digital humanities to assist in posing and answering philosophically interesting questions about mathematical research practice.

The project is led by professor Henrik Kragh Sørensen, Section for History and Philosophy of Science, Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen. It includes collaborations with colleagues and students at DSE as well as international partners.

Subprojects

We are actively pursuing subprojects on:

Theoretical and methodological aspects of using digital humanities to do philosophy of mathematical practice,
Detection and classification of diagrams,
Mapping of mathematical retractions,
Text-mining mathematical reviews, and
Text- and structure mining mathematical papers in the arXiv.

Group

We encourage friendly collaboration with colleagues, partners from abroad, and students.

Henrik Kragh Sørensen, PI, professor, DSE
Mikkel Willum Johansen, associate professor, DSE
Josefine Pallavicini, MA, research assistant, DSE
Anton Kristian Suhr, MSc, research assistant, DSE
Mikkel Tvorup Moseholm, MA, DSE
Chris Søndergaard Gassner Nielsen, MSc student, MATH/DSE
Stefan Gottlieb Kramer, BSc student, DIKU/DSE
Cæcilie Bøje Pedersen, BSc student, MATH/DSE
Kristoffer Rank Rasmussen, MSc student, MATH/DSE
Sophie Kjeldbjerg Mathiasen, MSc
Laura Søvsø Thomasen, PhD, Royal Danish Library

Collaborators

We collaborate on international, interdisciplinary projects.

Hester Breman (Maastricht) and Renee Hoekzema (Oxford) on visual thinking in mathematics
Vincent Coumans (Nijmegen) and Ned Wontner (Amsterdam) on evaluations of definitions in mathematics
Irida Altman (Zürich) on evolution of Heegaard diagrams

If you are interested in collaboration, see our Contributor- and Authorship guidelines and Contact Us.

Data sources

We can integrate data from a large number of sources:

Metadata, pdf-files and LaTeX sources from arXiv
Pdf files of research publications
Threads from lists on StackExchange
Threads in mailing lists such as FOM
Reviews from Mathematical Reviews (MathSciNet)
Public Twitter feeds
Publication networds from Clarivate Web Of Science

Pipelines

We work with a number of corpora with associated pipelines:

A pipeline for detecting and measuring mathematical diagrams in pdf files
A pipeline for extracting context-structured text from arXiv LaTeX sources
A pipeline for accessing metadata and reviews from the Mathematical Reviews
A pipeline for analysing 'threaded corpora' such as MathOverflow, mailing lists, etc.

Tools

We deploy a variety of big-data and ML-tools, including:

Object detection
POS-tagging and linguistic features
Dimension reduction (UMAP, PCA)
Topic modeling
Sentiment analysis

Software

Most of our code is written in python, and we rely on a set of key libraries for LaTeX and XML parsing, NLP, neural networks, statistical analysis, documentation etc.

Upcoming events

Henrik Kragh Sørensen: Digital Humanities for Philosophy of Mathematical Practice at Philosophy of Mathematics Beyond the Armchair?! (Düsseldorf, Invited; 2022-08-22 to 2022-08-26)

Recent publications

Pence, Charles, and Henrik Kragh Sørensen. 2022. “Extending Ourselves? On the Concept and Future of Digital Humanities.” SPSP Newsletter 17 (June). https://sway.office.com/9BAOrK8koNZYYsKe.

Johansen, Mikkel Willum, and Josefine Lomholt Pallavicini. 2022. “Entering the Valley of Formalism: Trends and Changes in Mathematicians’ Publication Practice — 1885 to 2015.” Synthese 200 (3). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03741-8.