What is going on?

September 2026. Katarina Halldin has written a very interesting master thesis in intellectual property law at Uppsala University under the supervision of our colleague Professor Bengt Domeij. The thesis examines the tensions in Sweden reagrding the principle of public access as a barrier to patentability. The thesis was defended during the spring semester of 2026. The thesis is highly relevant considering the decision by the government to launch an inquiry on the matter of st

September 2026. Fredrik Tell has received funding from the European Patent Office (EPO) together with Professor Frantzeska Papadopoulou Skarp from Stockholm University and Professor Marcus Holgersson from Chalmers University of Technology. The project "Beyond the Numbers: Ownership models, Professors’ Privilege and the Performance of Academic Patenting in Europe” has received EUR 50,000 from EPO and is led by Professor Frantzeska Papadopoulou Skarp. The project will run betwe

September 2026. Congratulations to Fredrik Tell and Yunchen Sun who have been awarded the Project Management Journal (PMJ) Paper of the Year Award for 2026 from the The Project Management Institute (PMI)! The paper "Tensions in Digital Transformation: How Prototype Work Links the Temporary and the Permanent" is available here: Sun, Yunchen & Fredrik Tell (2025), Tensions in Digital Transformation: How Prototype Work Links the Temporary and the Permanent, Project Management Jo

September 2026. During the fall semester UPHG will host a student project within in the Master's Programme in Data Science at the Department of Information Technology. We are delighted to welcome Elias Benjaminsson, Jain Garveet, and Qinwu Tian, students at the Department of Information Technology, to UPHG for their Data Science Project course this semester. They will be working on the project “Reconstructing Historical Patent Families via Image Similarity,” using computer vi

September 2026. Matti La Mela is the new Director of Studies at the Department of ALM at Uppsala University starting from the 2026/2027 academic year. There he will oversee the departments programs, such as the Master Programme in Archive, Library and Museum Studies and the Master Programme in Digital Humanities. Good choice by the department!

August 2026. Yunting Xie and Shigehiro Nishimura attended the 62nd Congress of the Business History Society of Japan at Hosei University, where they presented the paper: "Trading companies as international technology intermediaries: The case of Gadelius in Japan".

July 2026. Fredrik Tell presented the paper "The real cost of patents: Evidence from patent agencies’ books of accounts at the turn of the 19th century" at the 3rd World Congress of Business History at the University of Toronto.

July 2026. Great news! Swedish historical patents (back to 1885) are now also searchable from the Swedish Intellectual Property Office's databases. You can find the database here. Be sure to also check out https://svenskahistoriskapatent.se/SV/ for even more detailed (and older) information about historical Swedish patents.

June 2026. The master thesis written by Lu Zhang and supervised by UPHG researcher Yunting Xie was awarded the Swedish grade VG (pass with distinction). The thesis "AI Adoption in Public Institutions: A Case Study on Patent Documents Metadata Extraction" ".../.../...investigates the use of locally deployed open-source MLLMs for metadata extraction from historical Swedish patent documents. Conducted in collaboration with the Swedish Intellectual Property Office (PRV) and the

June 2026. Yunting Xie attended the SIRCSS Summer School in Computational Text Analysis 2026 at Campus Norrköping, Linköping University. This is part of the Research School in Computational Social Science (https://liu.se/en/research/research-school-in-computational-social-science), where Yunting is part of the 2025 cohort. The Swedish Interdisciplinary Research School in Computational Social Science (SIRCSS) provides courses, seminars, and networking opportunities for doctora

June 2026. UPHG researchers have gotten a paper accepted to the 62nd annual congress of the Business History Society of Japan. Yunting Xie will travel to Tokyo in August to present the paper "Trading companies as international technology intermediaries: The case of Gadelius in Japan" with our friend and colleague Professor Shigehiro Nishimura.

June 2026. Lu Zhang, a master student in digital humanities at the Department of ALM (and supervised by UPHG researcher Yunting Xie) presented preliminary results from her master thesis on the topic of automatic extraction of bibliographic data from patent documents using MLLMs. We look forward to reading the finished thesis!

June 2026. Fredrik Tell, David Andersson and Yunting Xie presented their work at the Uppsala Seminar in International Business on the role of historical patent families to explain technology diffusion and early internationalization before the emergence of the multinational enterprise (MNE) and managerial capitalism. This works builds on our 2024 paper: Family first: Defining, constructing, and applying historical patent families.

June 2026. Our interns for the spring, Yiwei, Risa and Sofia presented their work for the faculty at the Department of Business Studies along side other interns at the department. Yiwei's work focused on digitizing and structuring handwritten data from accounting books of patent agents. Risa presented her work on OCR solutions for Japanese patents and Sofia presented archival work on Swedish patent litigation at the turn of the nineteenth century. Very interesting work that y

May 2026. Associate Professor Clelia LaMonica from the Department of English at Uppsala University joined the UPHG seminar to talk about her research in digital humanities using patent data as well as potential collaborations and research applications.

April 2026. Yunting Xie and David Andersson presented a draft of a paper titled "Cumulative innovation and patent similarity". The core empirical question of the paper is: Why do “not so new” patents, those with high textual similarity to prior art, exhibit longer durations and higher perceived (economic) value?

May 2026. UPHG welcomes three new interns for the spring semester 2026. Sofia Jönsson Tellefors, Risa Yagisawa and Yiwei Wang, master students in digital humanities, will join the group as interns for the rest of the semester. They will work on different projects going at the group: HTR experiments & data collection for patent agency accounting books; Swedish inventors in biographical dictionaries (1778–1857) Digitalization of patent litigation data Karl Vogt and managing Ger

April 2026. Fredrik Tell has received a grant of 1,5 MSEK for the project "Social capital and innovation: How did personal ties and social networks among engineers influence inventive activity during Sweden’s industrialization, 1830-1936?" A new PhD student will start working on the project in the fall of 2026.

April 2026. THE DEADLINE HAS PASSED. Matti La Mela is hiring a postdoc for his project “Making public property: A Digital history of allemansrätten in Sweden and Finland, 1880–1950” (Vetenskapsrådet 2024-02209, PI Matti La Mela). The project investigates the emergence and meaning of allemansrätten (right of public access to nature) through digital analysis of historical source materials, with a particular focus on how access to nature and natural resources has been formulated

March 2026. Matti La Mela presented work in the workshop “Infrastructures to Reassemble Data Scattered across Domains, Borders and Media”. The presentation was about his digital history of allemansrätten project (https://lnkd.in/eZuaGUqX) and the digitisation of Diet of Estate minutes (1863-1906), which is currently being carried out in collaboration with Robert Borges and Måns Magnusson from the the SWERIK Swedish Riksdag (1867-2022) project.

February 2026. Yunting and Matti presented the paper 'You have no class! Large Language Model Classification of Nineteenth Century Patents in Sweden, 1852-1914', where we use large language models to classify historical patents, that had not received any technical classification at the time. We contrast human classification results with a BERT baseline and a commercial model; interestingly, we see that fine-tuned BERT (using Swedish BERT by KB) perform almost as well as the c

March 2026. Yunting Xie, Fredrik Tell, Matti La Mela and Shigehiro Nishimura presented papers at the BHC in London in two panels. Session 1h: Innovation in Peripheral Economies in the Long 20th Century City and Guilds LT664 Chair: Bernardita Escobar Andrae, University of Valparaiso Veronique Pouillard, University of Oslo" Analyzing Innovation through a Historical Patent Database: The Case of the Colonial Congo Patent System (1888-Early 1960s)" Matti La Mela, University of Up

March 2026. Mathias Johansson and Matti La Mela has published 'The Job Ads Database (JADB) Prototype Building a New Resource for Historical Labour Market Research' Citation for published version (APA): Johansson, M., Gladoić Håkansson, P., Karlsson, T., & La Mela, M. (2026). The Job Ads Database (JADB) Prototype: Building a New Resource for Historical Labour Market Research. (Lund Papers in Economic History; No. 2026:264). https://lucris.lub.lu.se/ws/portalfiles/portal/245359

March 2026. Workshop organised by Matti La Mela (Paris IAS, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Chair, Uppsala University) with the support of the Paris IAS. Open to the public via videoconference, registration required. Date: 09 apr 2026 13:30 - 10 apr 2026 13:15 This workshop initiates a multidisciplinary discussion around the digitisation and research of historical industrial intellectual property rights, such as patents, trademarks, and design rights, and the distinct textual and v

February 2026. Fredrik Tell and Matti La Mela are part of the WASP-HS cluster “AI Futures of Culture and Memory,” led by Anna Foka. “AI Futures of Culture and Memory” is a five-year interdisciplinary initiative at the forefront of critical inquiry into artificial intelligence, arts and humanities. The project brings together leading Swedish institutions, including Uppsala University (UU), Chalmers University of Technology, Linnaeus University (LnU), Umeå University (UmU), and

THE DEADLINE HAS PASSED AND THE POSITIONS ARE FILLED. 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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!

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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!

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”.

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 .

September 2025. Wei Luo's master thesis from the Master's Programme in Digital Humanities at the Department of ALM at Uppsala University is now available online. The title of the thesis is "Multimodal-LLM as A Reliable Tool for Information Extraction from Historical Documents: A Digital Humanities Approach to Swedish Patent Cards (1945-1975)". Read it here .

September 2025. Matti and Amanda Wasielewski have written a chapter entitled "What is Digital Humanities and what's it doing in the Department of ALM (Archive, Library, Museum)?" in the new anthology "Kod & Kultur: Institutionen för ABM i Uppsala 30 år – en forskarantologi" (eds. Rydbeck, K., Huvila, I. & Foka, A.). Read the chapter here .

September 2025. Now you can watch the official presentation of Matti and his RJ Advanced Studies project “Transnational innovation: A computational study of linguistic change and co-creation in France and Sweden during the Second Industrial Revolution”. Watch it here .

August 2025 Yunting attended the closing ceremony of the JSPS summer program after a fruitful research stay at Kobe University. Thank you Shigehiro-sensei for hosting her!

July 2025 Fredrik Tell and Matti La Mela presented the paper "Creating a Marketplace for Ideas during the Reign of Oscar II: ‘The Inventor Exchange’ in Sweden, 1886–1906" in the session "Patent Data in Economic History: Challenges and Prospects" , organized by Alexander Donges (University of Mannheim), Alessandro Nuvolari (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies) and Michelangelo Vasta (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies and University of Siena).