Today, members of the project convened for the first (digital) meeting of 2021. We were happy to be joined by professor Charles Pence of the Université Catholique de Louvain, who is starting up an adjacent project in his lab on ‘Mapping and Responding to Taxonomic Disorder’. The main of the project, which is funded by the Fonds de la recherche scientifique (FNRS), is to mobilise digital humanities tools to investigate patterns in taxonomic disorder and the causes behind them. These tools mainly serve to automate the analysis of large bodies of scientific literature, so that patterns can be discovered at a broad scale, and hypotheses can be tested on representative samples. Professor Pence has invested much of his time during last years in the development of such tools, and now wants to use this project on taxonomic disorder as a test-case. We are very happy to collaborate closely in the future. This collaboration will extend the opportunity of both projects to confront broad scale pattern analysis and hypothesis testing with fine-grained biological and philosophical analysis through literature case studies and interviews.
Taxonomic Disorder 