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Transnational and translational innovation: ML/AI for digitising and analysing historical patents and their language

The 53rd MetSem session will take place on Thursday, October 16, 2025, starting at 2:30pm. We will welcome Matti La Mela for a presentation on “Transnational and translational innovation: ML/AI for digitising and analysing historical patents and their language”.

Event, MetSem seminar

Salle du Conseil, 13 rue de l'Université, 75007 Paris

Session introduction

This presentation introduces research using AI and computational methods to investigate the history of innovation in the project “Transnational innovation: A computational study of linguistic change and co-creation in France and Sweden during the Second Industrial Revolution” (IEA Paris), and more broadly within the Uppsala Patent History Group (UPHG). The “Transnational Innovation” project analyses the emergence and circulation of new and significant technical knowledge through historical patents. Methodologically, the aim is to improve both NLP and LLM-guided approaches, which are used to study similarity (and dissimilarity) between patents in a historical and bilingual setting. I discuss also methodological insights regarding the digitisation and curation of patent data in UPHG. We apply multimodal language models to digitise and extract information from historical sources. We use an approach of error flagging through multimodality, which allows to control the quality of digitisation with human interventions.

Biography

Matti La Mela is an associate professor in digital humanities at Uppsala University. In 2025-2026, he is a researcher-in-residence at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (IEA), where his research project focuses on the history of innovation through the study of patents and their language in (between) France and Sweden.

Useful ressources

Personal website at IEA : https://www.paris-iea.fr/fr/liste-des-residents/matti-la-mela

UPHG website : www.uphg.se

Practical information

Pre-registration is mandatory (by Wednesday October 15 at the latest). 

Date: Wedneday October 16, 2025

Time: 14h30 - 16h30

Address: Salle du Conseil, 13 rue de l'université, 75007 Paris.