Introducing OpenAlex Mapper

Max Noichl & Andrea Loettgers

2025-04-02

To follow along, visit www.maxnoichl.eu/talk

Introducing

OpenAlex Mapper

The workflow of OpenAlex Mapper
Singh et al. (2023) McInnes, Healy, and Melville (2018) De Bruin (2023)

https://m7n-openalex-mapper.hf.space

https://possible-life-project-openalex-mapper-strong-gpu.hf.space

Now, why is this useful for HPSS?

  • Problem: Small samples, case studies – generalization, validation?
  • Answers questions of the form: “The Hopfield Model – where is it (really) a thing?”
  • Involved quantitative methods ground qualitative investigation.

Model templates – Debates about model transfer in science, model templates as a structuring principle orthogonal to disciplines.
Humphreys (2004) Knuuttila and Loettgers (2023)

Concepts – Distribution of concepts over large, interdisciplinary samples.
Malaterre, Chartier, and Lareau (2020) Zichert and Wüthrich (2024)

Methods – Relevant for debates on machine learning in science vs. class. statistics, theory free science.
Breiman (2001) Bzdok, Altman, and Krzywinski (2018) Andrews (2023)

Qualifications

Thank you!

Literature

Andrews, Mel. 2023. “The Devil in the Data: Machine Learning & the Theory-Free Ideal.”
Breiman, Leo. 2001. “Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures.” Statistical Science 16 (3): 199–215. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2676681.
Bzdok, Danilo, Naomi Altman, and Martin Krzywinski. 2018. “Statistics Versus Machine Learning.” Nature Methods 15 (4): 233–34. https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.4642.
De Bruin, Jonathan. 2023. “PyAlex.”
Humphreys, Paul. 2004. Extending Ourselves: Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method. Oxford University Press.
Knuuttila, Tarja, and Andrea Loettgers. 2023. “Model Templates: Transdisciplinary Application and Entanglement.” Synthese 201 (6): 200. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04178-3.
Malaterre, Christophe, Jean-François Chartier, and Francis Lareau. 2020. “The Recipes of Philosophy of Science: Characterizing the Semantic Structure of Corpora by Means of Topic Associative Rules.” Plos One 15 (11): e0242353.
McInnes, Leland, John Healy, and James Melville. 2018. “UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction.” arXiv:1802.03426 [Cs, Stat], February. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03426.
Singh, Amanpreet, Mike D’Arcy, Arman Cohan, Doug Downey, and Sergey Feldman. 2023. “SciRepEval: A Multi-Format Benchmark for Scientific Document Representations.” arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13308.
Zichert, Michael, and Adrian Wüthrich. 2024. “Tracing the Development of the Virtual Particle Concept Using Semantic Change Detection.” arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2410.16855.