Simon Rowberry

Abstract: Historians of technology use patent databases including the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Patent Full-Text and Image Database (PatFT) as evidence for technological development. While academics acknowledge the limitations of the content such as citations as a proxy for influence, less attention has been paid to how digital methods for accessing patent data – search engines, PDFs and webpages – alter our perception of PatFT as a primary source.

The USPTO provides access to all granted patents in the United States from Samuel Hopkin’s filing for the manufacture of potash in 1790 onwards via PatFT. There is a clear separation between patents filed before and after 1976, with the latter available as full searchable text, and the former available only as photograph facsimile copies of the original document. Plans to automate patent processing and discovery date back to the 1950s with the “Bush Report”, but it was not until the 1990s that the US government began to invest in the digitisation of patent submission and publishing workflows.

The forty-year lag between exploring and adopting electronic workflows has led to a fragmented discovery system. PDF documents differ from the searchable HTML full text in structure and metadata. Classification numbers are updated for historical filings, but there is no record of this update in either the HTML or PDF version. Some files were scanned from earlier efforts at microfilm preservation. Original copies of up to 5 million patent documents stored in Franconia, Virginia were destroyed in 2018, while the National Archives primarily holds material filed prior to 1978. As a result, many patents granted between 1978 and 1990, if not later, are only available as digital surrogates without a print copy of the original.Even born-digital records filed as late as 2000 started as semi-structured text records, enduring a brief transition to SGML (Standardised General Mark-up Language) in 2001, before settling on XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) standard in early 2002.

This paper examines how digital technologies and processes including data storage, digitisation, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) shape our knowledge of the history of innovation recorded in patent databases. Through questioning the relationship between patents as data and as digital objects, I demonstrate how what Ian Milligan has termed the “illusionary order” of digitized archives restricts the USPTO PatFT’s use as a data source.

While the reports of the ebook’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, dedicated e-readers have diminished in popularity with readers electing to use smartphones and tablets in their place. In this paper, I argue that beyond the e-reader’s continued role as a niche consumer electronic, it also fulfilled an important part of broad technological research and development that will continue to influence future trends in mobile computing and beyond.

Through case studies of e-reader’s early adoption of lithium-ion batteries and continual investment in bendable, low-power screens, I argue that e-reader’s long-term legacy will be solidified by its proof-of-concepts, rather than reading on-screen. For example, Nuvomedia, developers of the Rocket Ebook, designed the product to test the use of lithium-ion batteries, with the inventors later going on found Tesla. Likewise, Amazon subsidiary LiquaVista’s research into next generation electronic paper was a precursor for foldable phones. Through analysing the cutting-edge elements of e-reader design historically, I demonstrate the importance of the device within wider digital culture.

Patent databases including Espacenet and the USPTO Patent Full-Text and Image Database (PatFT) offer rich sources for big data analysis to document the evolution of a technology or to demonstrate the value of a filing through citation networks. While scholars such as Manuel Trajtenberg, Douglas O’Reagan and Lee Fleming have complicated the relationship between citations and chains of influence between inventors, less attention has been paid to the affordances and limitations of the databases storing the underlying data. Researchers can access patent databases as searchable, online databases or via third-party sources such as the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) US Patent citation data files, but how does the structure, type, and availability of data shape our understanding of patents as historical evidence?

In this paper, I offer a case study of the layers of digitisation embedded within USPTO PatFT and Patent Application Full-Text and Image Database (AppFT) to analyse what Ian Milligan terms the “illusionary order” of patent databases. PatFT and AppFT combined provide access to all granted patents in the United States from Samuel Hopkin’s filing for the manufacture of potash in 1790 to weekly updates of new patents in early 2019. There is a clear separation between patents filed before and after 1976, with the latter available as full searchable text, and the latter available only as photograph facsimile copies of the original document. While the USPTO began transitioning to digital workflows in the 1970s, the full text from this time can rely on automatic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) processes, leading to a difference between the facsimile PDF copy of the patent and the semantically-rich full text.

Discrepancies proliferate beyond simple historical distortions. PDF documents can differ from the HTML full text, and updates to patent classifications can create different versions of the same patent without acknowledgement of an update. Some files were scanned from earlier efforts at microfilm preservation. Original copies of up to 5 million patent documents stored in Franconia, Virginia were destroyed in 2018, while the National Archives primarily holds material filed prior to 1978. As a result, many patents filed prior to the complete adoption of digital workflows are only available as digital surrogates without a print copy of the original.

The provenance of these patents as digital objects is therefore uneven and can create an incomplete image of patent filings, which is only exacerbated in other national databases where even photo-facsimiles of all patents remain unavailable. This paper offers a bibliographic and media archaeological excavation of the database documenting the digitalisation of the USPTO’s workflows to contextualise the types of error that may affect our understanding of patents as documents.

Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg is often regarded as the first ebook publisher with Hart typing up the Declaration of Independence on a Xerox Sigma V at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1971. This mythology has perpetuated despite contradictory evidence: Hart did not coin the name ‘Project Gutenberg’ until the late 1980s, an early version of Milton’s Paradise Lost was an updated copy of a 1965 digitization by Joseph Raben at CUNY; and the Project’s first full book, the King James Bible, was not released until 1989.

In this paper, I challenge hagiographic accounts of Michael Hart’s early work within the broader context of early collaborative digitization work and innovations with the computer facilities at UIUC in the early 1970s. Computers and the Humanities, a prominent early digital humanities journal notes a range of digitization projects during the 1960s, and the Oxford Text Archive, a digital publication interchange network, formed in 1976. These early projects were more active than Hart, who only began work in earnest in the 1990s with the benefit of Usenet, FTP, and Gopher. Furthermore, Hart acknowledged but never used UIUC’s PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), an early computer network with a larger audience than ARPANET in the early 1970s, to disseminate texts. Through re-appraising Hart’s work within its historical and geographical context, the paper challenges the concept of a lone genius inventor of ebooks to propose a more inclusive history of digital publishing.

Abstract: Amazon have dominated the ebook market since the launch of the Kindle in 2007 but the next decade may be defined by the merger of the Independent Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in January 2017. The merger resulted in the formation of the W3C Publishing Working Group with the remit to maintain the EPUB standard while working to future-proof digital publications as “first-class entities on the Web” in the form of Packaged Web Publications (PWP). The proposed PWP specification would mark a paradigm shift for the book trade with ebooks gaining all the features of the modern Web rather than the more conservative EPUB specification.

The PWP specification is yet to be finalized but during its development, Working Group participants have extensively debated the limits of the book and its digital representation. The new standard must satisfy a broad range of use cases including trade publishing, scholarly communication, journalism, and grey literature. In this presentation, I conduct an analysis of the consensuses and fractures that will shape the presentation of books in browsers from a Science and Technology Studies perspective. The W3C offer an unprecedented level of transparency in decision making compared to prior ebook standards such as EPUB revealing the human decisions behind algorithmic interventions by mark-up validators, InDesign export wizards, and web browsers. These on-going discussions will not only shape the future of digital publishing, but return to the question of “what is a book?” in the context of the early twenty-first century.