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UPHG is hiring 1-2 PhD candidates
The Department of Business Studies at Uppsala University and UPHG is hiring 1-2 PhD candidates. For more information about the positions, see the weblink below. Deadline for applications is March 31 . Read more about the positions here: https://www.uu.se/en/about-uu/join-us/jobs-and-vacancies/job-details?query=903344 One position covers strategy and innovation more generally, while the other is part of a project proposal on social capital and innovation (funding pending). I


Yunting Xie receives the Alfred Chandler travel grant
February 2026. Yunting has received the Alfred Chandler travel grant to attend The 2026 BHC Meeting, which will be held at the Imperial College London, March 26-28.


Fredrik Tell is a visiting researcher at the Graduate School of Business Administration, Kobe University, Japan
February 2026. In February, Fredrik will be a visiting resercher at the Graduate School of Business Administration, Kobe University. There he will work Professor Shigehiro Nishimura on topics on international business history and intellectual property management.


Lu Zhang writes her master thesis with UPHG
January 2026. Lu Zhang, who is a master student at the Master Program in Digital Humanities will write her master's thesis with UPHG. The thesis is a collaboration between UPHG and the Swedish Intellectual Property Office and will analyze methods for extracting bibliographic information from patent document with varying layouts over time. Yunting will serve as Lu's supervisor.


Matti La Mela presents at IEA Paris
January 2026. Matti presented his work at the IEA research seminar titled: Transnational innovation: a computational study on co-creation in France and Sweden during the Second Industrial Revolution.


Apply for UPHG spring internships 2026!
January 2026. There are 1-2 internship opportunities available in the Uppsala Patent History Group ( https://www.uphg.se/ ) during May-June. The internships involve working as a research assistant in the group studying Swedish patent and innovation history from the early 19 th century until 1970s with digitised patent data and diverse AI approaches. Contact David Andersson or Fredrik Tell if you are interested.


Yunting Xie presents her work at the PhD colloquium for historical studies at UU Circus network
January 2026. Yunting presented "Texts between archives and algorithms: Swedish patents and the circulation of technological knowledge, 1885-1945". She explores how to integrate computational text analysis and data science approaches into historical research, and how this can reshape the ways we interpret historical sources, based on her PhD research on Swedish historical patents and the global circulation of technological knowledge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.


Paper accepted to World Congress of Business History in Toronto, July 27-31
January 2026. The working paper by David, Matti and Fredrik titled " The real cost of patents: Evidence from patent agencies’ books of accounts at the turn of the 19th century", has been accepted to the WCBH 2026. Fredrik will present the paper in the end of July.


New publication by Matti La Mela in Digital Humanities Quarterly
December 2025. Matti has published a new article titled "A Critical Collection History of Nineteenth-century Women’s Letters: Overcoming the Occluded Archive with Data-Driven Methods" together with Ilona Pikkanen, Hanna-Leena Paloposki and Jouni Tuominen. Read it here . Abstract: This paper presents a “virtual archive” of women’s epistolary exchange in 19th-century Finland. By harmonising metadata from over 1.2 million letters and over 100,000 correspondents across key cultu


Matti La Mela receives a RJ Research Initiation grant
December 2025. Matti La Mela has received a RJ Research Initation grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Matti is currently a RJ Advanced Studies scholar and will use the funding to oragnize a workshop in Paris in April 2026. Congratulations!


UPHG receives funding from Åke Wiberg Foundation
December 2025. UPHG has received a generous research grant of SEK 200,000 for the project "Forgotten foundations: Swedish inventors in the very long run and the roots of industrial growth, 1400-1800". We look forward to the results!


New patent data available, 1852-1884
December 2025. Digitized patent data from 1852-1884 are now available for download in the National Archives Database (NAD). These include all patents published in the official bulletin (Post- och inrikes tidningar) under the old 1856 patent law and some from the earlier 1834 patent law. Only the patent letters are available. You can find the data here: https://sok.riksarkivet.se/nad/?postid=Arkis%2049987f72-9b89-11d5-a701-0002440207bb


Sara and Lu wrap up their internships in the group
December 2025. Our fall interns, Sara and Lu, have now finished their internships. Some of their assignments included working with the SHPI, visiting archives and creating training data for OCR-models. Lu will continute working with us in the spring as she writes her master's thesis on topics concerning extraction of bibliographic data from patent documents, in collabortion with PRV


UPHG creates training data for the Swedish National Archives
December 2025. UPHG is currently working with the Swedish National Archives to digitize patent data from before the 1884 patent law. We are also creating training data for their OCR-models. You can find them here: https://huggingface.co/Riksarkivet


UPHG hosts Marco Martinez from University of Pisa
December 2025. In a joint seminar with the Department of Business Studies and the Entrepreneurship sector, Marco Martinez from the University of Pisa, presented his paper " The French Connection: technology transfer and invention between Fin-de-Siècle France and Italy ", which is ongoin work with Youssouf Merouani and Faustine Perrin


UPHG collaborates with PRV for new master thesis
November 2025. UPHG and the Swedish Intellectual Property Office (PRV) will collaborate on a master thesis in digital humanities. The master thesis will help PRV develop methods to automatically extract and organize bibliographic data from different types of older patent specifications from the Swedish Patent Database . The project will take place during the of spring 2026. We look forward to the results!


UPHG organizes a workshop on SHPI with Intercyd
November 2025. UPHG and Spanish IT firm Intercyd will hold a workshop on the development of the Swedish Historical Patents Infrastructure (SHPI).


UPHG welcomes two new interns
November 2025. Sara van der Woude and Lu Zhang, two master students from the Master's programme in Digital Humanities, will spend five weeks as interns at UPHG. They will visit archives, work on segmenting and creating training data on pre-1885 patents for Riksarkivet, analyzing working clause data, and constructing test samples for automatic retrieval of bilbiographic data from different layouts of Swedish patent specifications. Welcome!


Fredrik Tell attends the "Social Capital, Human Capital & Innovation" workshop in Pescara, Italy
October 2025. Fredrik presented a project about a personal ties and inventive activity during Sweden's industrialization at the Department of Management and Business Administration at the Università degli Studi “Gabriele d’Annunzio”.


Matti La Mela presents at MetSem #53 at Science Po, Paris
October 2025. Matti presented the project “Transnational innovation: A computational study of linguistic change and co-creation in France and Sweden during the Second Industrial Revolution” at Séminaire Méthodologie de Sciences Po. Watch the presentation here .
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