Research Areas

Philosophy and History of Science (in particular Physics), Continental Philosophy, Early Modern Philosophy, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Digital Humanities

Current research projects at CSTMS:

• AHQP Archive for the History of Quantum Physics - DIGITAL PLATFORM

The AHQP Digital Platform is a collaborative initiative to curate the Archive for the History of Quantum Physics (AHQP) collection and facilitate its use as an instrument of interdisciplinary research. It will apply Digital Humanities tools of inquiry to existing archival material, and meant to be an interactive platform for Quantum Dialogue – past and present.

The AHQT, currently held at many locations, contains rare, yet largely unpublished and unexploited first-hand documents (interviews, notebooks, letters, memoirs) of physicists involved in the early development of quantum theory in the first decades of the twentieth century. The web-based digital platform will host digitized material of the collection and incorporate newly digitized material on an ongoing basis. In addition to providing initiative and precedence for twenty-first century digital collections; its innovative research tools will allow for guided interdisciplinary exploration, computational text analysis, and the representation of theories and/or concepts through the use of new software developed or borrowed from Data Science and Digital Humanities. The platform will provide annotated commentaries, indexes and synopses of collection material, and will manage interactive discussions, forums, and blogs. With these features, the AHQP Digital Platform goes beyond the current scope of conventional digital archives.

• HISTORY OF QUANTUM DISCOURSE (HQD)

The History of Quantum Discourse (HQD) is a research project entangled with, and embedded within the AHQP Digital Platform project. I work with AHQP archival material, primarily with the Thomas Kuhn Interview Collection. I focus my interest on the discursive and conceptual side, aiming to deliver a comprehensive overview of the various conceptual problems and debates in the early stages of Quantum theory.

The project “History of Quantum Discourse” aims to reconstruct, analyze, evaluate and annotate the discourses of early quantum theory by working with unpublished archival material collected in the Archives for the History of Quantum Physics (AHQP). The AHQP collection was assembled during a project initiated by the American Philosophical Society (APS) and American Institute of Physics (AIP) in the mid-1960ies in an effort to secure valuable first hand documents of physicists involved of quantum theory development in the first decades of the 20th century. The project, funded by a NSF grant, compiled research correspondence, letters, memoirs, lectures, papers and laboratory notebooks together with about 180 interview recordings with 95 physicists (the original transcripts of the recordings being part of the UC Berkeley repository).

Natascha Gruver

Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna
Currently works with the G.W. Leibniz Archives in Hannover (Germany) and the Wittgenstein Archives in Bergen (Norway)
Database Manager at ibw Austria – Research & Development in VET, with fifteen years of experience working with web-based databases and content management systems.