Professor Joe Cain

HPSC0028 History of Life Sciences

A historical survey of the biological sciences from the Enlightenment to the present. What are the big names and big ideas? How were they received at the time and appropriated later? Who’s been ignored and […]

HPSC0010 History of Modern Science

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HPSC0009 Introduction to History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science

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Simulated bookshelf showing HPS reading list. (Credit: NanoBanana)

Reading List for MSc History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) Prep

This post lists a series of books my colleagues and I in UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) talk about as useful when preparing for MSc-level study in our fields. This list doesn’t identify everything one might want to read in a subject, but it’s […]

Project Pitch Explained for HPSC0044 Undergraduates

In HPSC0044 Science and the Publishing Industry students develop a book proposal. First, they sketch an idea. Second, they deliver a project pitch. Third, they submit a book proposal. To help students think about the […]

John Martin's 1837 The Country of the Iguanodon

The Country of the Iguanodon, by Gideon Mantell – Two Versions

“The Country of the Iguanodon” is Gideon Mantell’s attempt to imagine the paleoecology of dinosaurs. Transcripts of 1838 and 1851 descriptions.

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Gideon Mantell (1851) Petrifactions and Their Teaching, frontispiece, Notoris mantelli

Gideon Mantell’s 1851 Guide to Fossils at British Museum

Gideon Mantell’s 1851 guide to fossils at British Museum, including Iguanodon, Megalosaurus, Hylaeosaurus, marine reptiles, and more.

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Illustration of "ring species" concept, or Rassenkreis

Society for the Study of Speciation: Bibliographic Analysis Using LLM

I provide data for an LLM-based analysis of the short-lived Society for the Study of Speciation (SSS), organised by Alfred Emerson, through three documents.

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Proceedings of the Seventh International Genetical Congress held in 1939 and published in 1941.

Using LLMs to query 1939 International Genetical Congress

What work can large-language models (LLMs) do for historical researching? They offer tools for voluminous compilation of data ready for complex human analysis. They can organise and reorganise data. They can extract data from source material. They can be set to search for trends. We’re coming to grips with LLM tools for historical researching, and we’re quickly moving well beyond the LLM-as-author model so distrusted in our community. Historians must push ourselves to be as creative and demanding of LLM resources as those in our sister disciplines.

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