What is going on?
Here you can read news and find information about what is going on at UPHG.
UPHG internal seminars take place every Tuesday at 15:00-17:00.
​November 2025
UPHG collaborates with PRV for new master thesis
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 organizes a workshop on SHPI with Intercyd
UPHG and Spanish IT firm Intercyd will hold a workshop on the development of the Swedish Historical Patents Infrastructure (SHPI).
​November 2025
UPHG welcomes two new interns
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 Tell attends the "Social Capital, Human Capital & Innovation" workshop in Pescara, Italy
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 La Mela presents at MetSem #53 at Science Po, Paris
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.
​October 2025
The latest UPHG master thesis is available online
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 The title of the thesis is "Multimodal-LLM as A Reliable Tool for Information Extraction from Historical Documents: A Digital Humanities Approach to Swedish Patent Cards (1945-1975)".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.
​October 2025
Matti La Mela writes about digital humanities in new anthology
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.
Fredrik Tell and Matti La Mela organized a workshop at Grand Hotel Lund about Historical research on patents and innovation for participants at the World Economic History Conference (WEHC) in Lund.
​June 2025
Yunting Xie starts her JSPS research fellowship at Kobe University
Yunting has arrived in Japan where she will be a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) research fellow at Kobe University as part of their JSPS Summer Program. There she will collaborate with Professor Shigehiro Nishimura and do research on Japan-Sweden patent families and the activities of Japanese patent agents during the second industrial revolution.
​May 2025
Matti La Mela is interviewed in Extrakt of FORMAS: the Swedish research council for sustainable development (in Swedish)
​September 2025
Watch Matti La Mela's researcher presentation at IEA Paris
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 Xie wraps up her JSPS research fellowship at Kobe University
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
UPHG attends the World Economic History Conference (WEHC) in Lund
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).
​July 2025
UPHG organizes a pre-conference workshop before the WEHC in Lund
Matti was interviewed about his research project "Making public property: a digital history of allemansrätten in Sweden and Finland, 1880–1950". Read it here.
​April 2025
Matti La Mela and Yunting Xie present at the Digital Humanities Research Seminar at University of Helsinki
Matti and Yunting presented the project "From Invention to Innovation: Natural Language Processing to Study Swedish Historical Patents (1890—1945)"
​March 2025
Yunting Xie and Matti La Mela attends DHNB 2025 in Tartu, Estonia
Yunting presented the paper "MLLM-Assisted Information Extraction from Historical Documents" at the Digital Humanities in the Nordic & Baltic Countries (DHNB) conference in Tartu. The conference took place at the Estonian National Museum.
​March 2025
Matti La Mela attends ESSHC 2025 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Matti presented a paper on the history of allemansrätten and digital conceptual analysis, which is part of the new research project (2025-2028) funded by the Swedish Research Council, titled “Making public property: a digital history of allemansrätten in Sweden and Finland, 1880–1950”. The conference took place at Leiden University.
​March 2025
Fredrik Tell attends the 2025 BHC meeting in Atlanta (GA), USA
Fredrik presented the paper "Innovation undecided? Laboring patent litigation in Sweden, 1885-1925" in the session "Patents and innovation" at the Business History Conference (BHC) in Atlanta.
​January 2025
Fredrik Tell is the guest editor for the Scandinavian Economic History Review
Together with Michelangelo Vasta from the University of Siena, Fredrik Tell is the guest editor for a special issue in the Scandinavian Economic History Review (SEHR). The theme for the special issue is: "Patent history and economic growth: Institutional frameworks, practices, and global perspectives". Read more here.
