Books and dissertations
Parolini, Giuditta (2015) Mario Tchou: Ricerca e Sviluppo per l’elettronica Olivetti. Milano: Egea.
The book is a scientific biography of Mario Tchou, a founding father of Italian computer science. It is also an account of the rise and fall of the R&D initiative in electronics that he directed during the 1950s and 1960s on behalf of the Italian company Olivetti, a brand famous worldwide for its mechanical calculators and typewriters. By considering the issues of industrial R&D the monograph contributes to investigate critical aspects of technology transfer in Italy.
Parolini, Giuditta (2013) “Making Sense of Figures”: Statistics, Computing and Information Technologies in Agriculture and Biology in Britain, 1920s-1960s. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Bologna.
Throughout the twentieth century statistical methods have increasingly become part of experimental research. In particular, statistics has made quantification processes meaningful in the soft sciences, which had traditionally relied on activities such as collecting and describing diversity rather than timing variation. The thesis explores this change in relation to agriculture and biology, focusing on analysis of variance and experimental design, the statistical methods developed by the mathematician and geneticist Ronald Aylmer Fisher during the 1920s. The role that Fisher’s methods acquired as tools of scientific research, side by side with the laboratory equipment and the field practices adopted by research workers, is here investigated bottom-up, beginning with the computing instruments and the information technologies that were the tools of the trade for statisticians. Four case studies show under several perspectives the interaction of statistics, computing and information technologies, giving on the one hand an overview of the main tools – mechanical calculators, statistical tables, punched and index cards, standardised forms, digital computers – adopted in the period, and on the other pointing out how these tools complemented each other and were instrumental for the development and dissemination of analysis of variance and experimental design. The period considered is the half-century from the early 1920s to the late 1960s, the institutions investigated are Rothamsted Experimental Station and the Galton Laboratory, and the statisticians examined are Ronald Fisher and Frank Yates.
Parolini, Giuditta (2009) “DNA Goes Digital: Computers, Models, and Visualisation Strategies for Proteins and Nucleic Acids“. MSc Dissertation, Imperial College London.
During the 1950s and 1960s computers gained an increasing relevance in the making of structural representations of proteins and nucleic acids. My dissertation investigates this digital transformation in biology following the work and career of the crystallographer Robert Langridge. Langridge, BSc in physics in 1954, PhD in crystallography in 1957, founding father of molecular graphics during the 1960s, has been a pioneer in the application of digital computers to the crystallographic calculations and the digital visualization of the DNA double helix. In his research he benefited from the interdisciplinary environment offered by molecular biology, and he became neither a full-fledged molecular biologist nor a mere computer scientist, but conducted his entire academic career mixing the two profiles. Holding appointments in chemistry and biology, he pursued his interest for computer-aided visualization and in the late 1960s he established at Princeton one of the first laboratories for molecular graphics, where he promoted the development of real-time vector graphics displays as a digital alternative to real molecular models.
Peer-reviewed book chapters
Parolini, Giuditta (2015) From Computing Girls to Data Processors: Women Assistants in the Rothamsted Statistics Department. Contribution for the book Women, Gender and ICT in Europe (Springer International Publishing), edited by Valérie Schafer and Benjamin Thierry.
Over two hundred women worked as computing assistants in the Rothamsted statistics department during the twentieth century. They were employed in the analysis of field and laboratory experiments and in the examination of the returns of agricultural surveys. Before World War II they did calculations with pen, paper, slide rules and electromechanical calculating machines, but during the 1950s, when the department underwent an early process of computerization, their tasks shifted to data processing. Only sparse records exist on the work of these women, and their contribution to the activity of the Rothamsted statistics department has never been assessed consigning them to invisibility. Combining the literature currently available on laboratory technicians with the one on human computers and data processors the paper will provide a longue durée perspective (1920s-1990) on the work of the female assistants in the Rothamsted statistics department, addressing two distinct aspects. On the one hand it will examine how the tasks of these women evolved with the computing technologies available in the department. On the other hand the paper will reflect on the invisibility of these assistants, who are never explicitly accounted as contributors to the scientific activity of the Rothamsted statistics department, despite being a conspicuous component of its staff.
Parolini, Giuditta (2008) Olivetti Elea 9003: Between Scientific Research and Computer Business. IFIP International Federation for Information Processing. Vol. 269; History of Computing and Education 3. Edited by John Impagliazzo. Boston: Springer: 37-53.
About fifty years ago, Elea 9003, the first Italian mainframe fully transistorized, was built in the Olivetti Electronic Research Laboratory. The mainframe was realized with a drain of international expertise and training on-the- job of scientific staff. The head of the Laboratory, Mario Tchou, had a valuable experience in electronics in the U.S. and his collaborators, at first mainly Italian, were chosen for previous experience in pulse modulation methods. Elea 9003 was built with germanium diodes and transistors. They successfully sold the mainframe on the national market, but Olivetti electronic enterprise did not last. After the unexpected deaths of Adriano Olivetti (1960) and Mario Tchou (1961) there were inner contrasts in the management. Moreover, the national market was very limited and the Italian government did not help in any way the company. Therefore, in 1964 due to financial problems and shortsighted business strategies, Olivetti dismissed its main electronic assets and sold the Electronic Department to General Electric. However, the seeds of the work done by Olivetti Laboratory sprouted later on in computer science thanks to Programma 101, the first desktop computer.
Peer-reviewed special issues
Parolini, Giuditta (ed.) (2015) Experimentation in Twentieth-Century Agricultural Science, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Vol. 37(3).
Collection of essays on experimental practices in agriculture during the twentieth century. Contributions include case studies on the use of statistics in field experiments, animal breeding, and animal disease management.
Peer-reviewed journal papers
Parolini, Giuditta and Glöckler, Falko (forthcoming) Automating DOI registration with DataCite API. E-Science-Tage 2023 Conference Proceedings, University of Heidelberg.
Automation is a main trend in all contexts in which data are a valuable asset. Sustained growth in the amount of available data, greater interest in extracting knowledge from data, and significant increase in data regulations and policies are constantly shifting the balance from human-based to automated data management solutions. Research data management is also experiencing this automation trend. The tasks of research data management teams have been constantly expanding in recent years. More demanding funder policies regarding research data and growing needs on the side of researchers, who are dealing with scientific data in quantities never experienced before, are constantly increasing the workload of research data management teams. Automation becomes therefore a necessary choice to avoid limiting or reducing the services provided to users. The paper will discuss an example of automation implemented to meet the significant increase in DOI (Digital Object Identifier) registration requests for data publications received at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN). It will present the web application that the MfN research data management team has been building to automate the DOI registration process with the provider DataCite. Running in a Docker container, a Django web application calls the DataCite API and interoperates with MfN institutional databases to prompt the DOI creation and to collect the metadata that are required for DOI registration. The paper will reflect on the code development process and the design of the user interface. It will also examine the opportunities that the web application offers for the work of the MfN research data management team, such as increased processing speed for DOI requests and improved quality control in the data publication process.
Parolini G, Glöckler F (2023) Entwicklung effizienter und nachhaltiger Datenmanagementdienste. b.i.t-online 26(3)
Efficiency and sustainability play a central role in the continuing development of research data management services. Given the steady increase in research data and their usage, these objectives can hardly be achieved continuing to develop manual processes. The paper will discuss an example of process transformation implemented to achieve efficiency and sustainability when publishing data with DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers). It will present the Django web application that the Science Data Management team at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin has developed to automate the registration process using the API made available by the DOI provider DataCite.
Parolini, Giuditta , The International Meteorological Organization and its Commission for Agricultural Meteorology After WWI, submission for the special issue “Blockades of the Mind- Science, Academies, and the Aftermath of the Great War”, Acta Historica Leopoldina No.78 (2021).
The paper examines how international cooperation in meteorology was rebuilt after World War I. It does so by using as a case study the technical commission on agriculture set up by the International Meteorological Organization. Being focused on agriculture, the work of the Commission for Agricultural Meteorology was even more affected by the long shadow of the war. During the conflict large parts of Europe, the geographic area from which the majority of the Commission’s members came, had suffered severe food shortages. Yet, former enemies on the front line found themselves sharing national practices in agricultural meteorology and working towards the establishment of joint international observational and experimental schemes only a few years after the conclusion of the war. The paper will discuss the Commission’s structure and its agenda in the interwar years. It will become apparent that the Commission built its own agenda on the recognition that sharing data, publications, instruments, and research programmes in agricultural meteorology was the only viable solution if European nations wanted more resilient agricultural systems.
Parolini, Giuditta, Building Networks of Knowledge Exchange in Agricultural Meteorology: The Agro-Meteorological Service in French Indochina, submission for the special issue “A Question of Scale: Making Meteorological Knowledge and Nation in Imperial Asia”, History of Meteorology Vol. 9 (2020).
During the 1910s, the International Meteorological Organisation created an ad hoc commission for the study of agricultural meteorology. Meteorologists and agronomists working in Europe, Asia, and America took part in the commission’s work sharing their national experiences in the collection of meteorological and crop data, and in forecasting weather for the needs of farmers. The commission also promoted the creation of international schemes of observation and experiment in agricultural meteorology and explored opportunities to communicate relevant results in international publications. The paper will investigate the work of the commission in establishing networks of knowledge exchange between East and West. It will address the challenges faced by the commission in harmonizing national strategies in agricultural meteorology and the tensions that emerged due the highly localised nature of agriculture by using the case of agrometeorological service in French Indochina.
Parolini, Giuditta, Then and Now: Re-positioning the History of Agriculture within the History of Science and Technology, submission for the special issue “Vingt ans d’histoire des sciences et des techniques”, Cahiers François Viète Série III, N° 9 (2020)
Twenty years ago, the history of agriculture was the Cinderella of the history of science and technology. Historians interested in scientific and technological developments were reluctant to engage with agriculture, a field whose scientific boundaries are ambiguous and where research does not take place only in a controlled laboratory environment, but also in open fields. Today, the situation has greatly changed and a rich scholarship on the history of agriculture is emerging within the history of science and technology. This scholarship has repositioned the history of agriculture at the intersection of debates on science and technology, food and the environment, politics and society. The paper will highlight what has been achieved so far and sketch possible developments.
Müller-Wille, Staffan and Parolini, Giuditta, Punnett Squares and Hybrid Crosses: How Mendelians Learned Their Trade by the Book, BJHS Themes (2020).
The rapid reception of Gregor Mendel’s paper “Experiments on Plant Hybrids” (1866) in the early decades of the twentieth century remains poorly understood. We will suggest that this reception should not exclusively be investigated as the spread of a theory, but also as the spread of an experimental and computational protocol. Early geneticists used Mendel’s paper, as well as reviews of Mendelian experiments in a variety of other publications, to acquire a unique combination of experimental and mathematical skills. We will analyse annotations in copies of Mendel’s paper itself, in early editions and translations of this paper, and in early textbooks such as Reginald Punnett’s Mendelism (1905) or Wilhelm Johannsen’s Elemente der exakten Erblichkeitslehre (1909). We will examine how readers used copies of such works to reproduce the logic behind Mendelian experiments, either by recalculating results, or by retracing the underlying combinatorial reasoning. We will place particular emphasis on the emergent role of diagrams in teaching and learning the practice of Mendelian genetics.
Parolini, Giuditta (2017) Music Without Musicians… But with Scientists, Technicians, and Computer Companies. Contribution to the Special Issue ‘Alternative Histories of Electroacoustic Music’ (J. Mooney, D. Schampaert and T. Boon eds.), Organised Sound Vol. 22(2): 286-296, https://doi.org/10.1017/S135577181700019X.
In the early days of music technologies the collaboration between musicians, scientists, technicians and equipment producers was very close. How did this collaboration develop? Why did scientific, business, and musical agendas converge towards a common goal? Was there a mutual exchange of skills and expertise? To answer these questions this article will consider a case study in early computer music. It will examine the career of the Italian cellist and composer Pietro Grossi (1917–2002), who explored computer music with the support of mainframe manufacturers, industrial R&D, and scientific institutions. During the 1970s, Grossi became an eager programmer and achieved a first-hand experience of computer music, writing several software packages. Grossi was interested in avant-garde music as an opportunity to make ‘music without musicians’. He aimed at a music composed and performed by machines, and eventually, he achieved this result with his music software. However, to accomplish it, Grossi could not be a lonely pioneer; he had to become a member, albeit an atypical one, of the Italian computing community of the time. Grossi’s story, thus, can tell us much about the collaborative efforts stimulated by the use of early computer technologies in sound research, and how these efforts developed at the intersection of science, art and industry.
Parolini, Giuditta (2015) Charting the history of agricultural experiments, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Vol. 37(3): 231-241.
Agricultural experimentation is a world in constant evolution, spanning multiple scientific domains and affecting society at large. Even though the questions underpinning agricultural experiments remain largely the same, the instruments and practices for answering them have changed constantly during the twentieth century with the advent of new disciplines like molecular biology, genomics, statistics, and computing. Charting this evolving reality requires a mapping of the affinities and antinomies at work within the realm of agricultural research, and a consideration of the practices, tools and social and political structures in which agricultural experiments are grounded. Three main questions will be addressed to provide an overview of the complex world of agricultural research investigated by the special issue: What is an agricultural experiment? Who is an experimenter in agriculture? Where do agricultural experiments take place? It will become apparent that agricultural experiments have a wide relevance for human development as they touch upon concerns related to human health and nutrition, contribute to policy discussions, and can affect the social and political structures in which farming is embedded.
Parolini, Giuditta (2015) In pursuit of a science of agriculture: the role of statistics in field experiments, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Vol. 37(3): 261-281.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century statistics has reshaped the experimental cultures of agricultural research taking part in the subtle dialectic between the epistemic and the material that is proper to experimental systems. This transformation has become especially relevant in field trials and the paper will examine the British agricultural institution, Rothamsted Experimental Station, where statistical methods nowadays popular in the planning and analysis of field experiments were developed in the 1920s. At Rothamsted statistics promoted randomisation over systematic arrangements, factorisation over one-question trials, and emphasised the importance of the experimental error in assessing field trials. These changes in methodology transformed also the material culture of agricultural science, and a new body, the Field Plots Committee, was created to manage the field research of the agricultural institution. Although successful, the vision of field experimentation proposed by the Rothamsted statisticians was not unproblematic. Experimental scientists closely linked to the farming community questioned it in favour of a field research that could be more easily understood by farmers. The clash between the two agendas reveals how the role attributed to statistics in field experimentation defined different pursuits of agricultural research, alternately conceived of as a scientists’ science or as a farmers’ science.
Parolini, Giuditta (2014) The emergence of modern statistics in agricultural science: analysis of variance, experimental design and the reshaping of research at Rothamsted Experimental Station, 1919-1933, Journal of the History of Biology, DOI: 10.1007/s10739-014-9394-z. Printed in 2015 in Vol. 48(2): 301-335.
During the twentieth century statistical methods have transformed research in the experimental and social sciences. Qualitative evidence has largely been replaced by quantitative results and the tools of statistical inference have helped foster a new ideal of objectivity in scientific knowledge. The paper will investigate this transformation by considering the genesis of analysis of variance and experimental design, statistical methods nowadays taught in every elementary course of statistics for the experimental and social sciences. These methods were developed by the mathematician and geneticist R. A. Fisher during the 1920s, while he was working at Rothamsted Experimental Station, where agricultural research was in turn reshaped by Fisher’s methods. Analysis of variance and experimental design required new practices and instruments in field and laboratory research, and imposed a redistribution of expertise among statisticians, experimental scientists and the farm staff. On the other hand the use of statistical methods in agricultural science called for a systematization of information management and made computing an activity integral to the experimental research done at Rothamsted, permanently integrating the statisticians’ tools and expertise into the station research programme. Fisher’s statistical methods did not remain confined within agricultural research and by the end of the 1950s they had come to stay in psychology, sociology, education, chemistry, medicine, engineering, economics, quality control, just to mention a few of the disciplines which adopted them.
Conference papers
Parolini G (2023) Setting Sustainability Goals for Biodiversity Informatics Infrastructure. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 7: e110675. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.110675
Parolini G, von Mering S, Petersen M (2023) Classifying Colonial Objects in Museum Collections with Machine Learning and Historical Knowledge. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 7: e110872. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.110872
Book reviews
Parolini, Giuditta (2016) Denise Phillips and Sharon Kingsland (eds.), New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Vol. 38:21.
Parolini, Giuditta (2015) Review of Hallam Stevens, Life Out of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 37, No. 1.
Parolini, Giuditta (2014) Review of Charles N. Yood, Hybrid Zone: Computers and Science at Argonne National Laboratory 1946-1992, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 36, No. 3: 91-92.
Parolini, Giuditta (2013) Review of Paul Ceruzzi, Computing: A Concise History, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 35, No. 4: 87-88.
Preprints
Parolini, Giuditta (2016) Editor (with T. Morel and C. Pastorino), The Making of Useful Knowledge, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) Preprint Series, No. 481.
Since its development in economic history, the notion of ‘Useful Knowledge’ has found wide resonance in very diverse fields, engaging scholars working on codified knowledge and scientific practices, material culture and technological innovation, experimentation and policy issues. This preprint presents some of the contributions on this theme delivered at the workshop ‘The Making of Useful Knowledge’ (MPIWG Berlin, 30–31 October 2014). The meeting aimed at problematizing the apparently coherent picture of useful knowledge that has arisen out of the works of economic historians like Joel Mokyr, and at testing and evaluating the employment of notions of usefulness in the longue durée, moving away from a specific focus on pre-industrial economic growth. Because of this diachronic approach, case studies spanned from the early modern period to the twentieth century. This volume collects an introduction and six essays by Karel Davids, Jonathan Harwood, Ursula Klein, Thomas Morel, Giuditta Parolini and Cesare Pastorino. Topics of these contributions range from commercial accounting, plant breeding and maritime technology, to mining, mineralogy and applied statistics. The workshop ‘The Making of Useful Knowledge’ was organized by Thomas Morel, Giuditta Parolini and Cesare Pastorino as part of the activities of the Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge.
Parolini, Giuditta (2016) “Farming, meteorology and field experiments: using statistics to improve agricultural practices”. The Making of Useful Knowledge, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) Preprint Series, No. 481.
Parolini, Giuditta (2018) Building Human and Industrial Capacity in European Biotechnology: The Yeast Genome Sequencing Project (1989–1996). DepositOnce TU Berlin.
During the years 1989-1996 the European Commission took a leading role in sequencing the yeast genome. The project was completed in April 1996 and celebrated as the success of a European research strategy based on a distributed model of scientific collaboration. Almost one hundred laboratories and private companies dispersed all over Europe took part in the sequencing work sponsored by the European Commission and an industrial platform was created to facilitate the exploitation of the genomic data by companies which were interested in yeast. The yeast genome project was part of the biotechnology strategy developed by the European Commission during the 1980s and 1990s. The Commission expected biotechnology to be relevant in crucial areas of political, economic and social intervention and wanted to promote economic growth and contribute to the process of European integration by developing a community strategy in biotechnology. Due to the strong industrial value of yeast, which is used by agrofood, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, sequencing the genome of this microorganism proved an ideal opportunity to pursue the Commission’s plans and the paper will examine how the yeast genome project was shaped to build human and industrial capacity in European biotechnology. By investigating capacity building, it will be possible to understand why the European Commission decided to sponsor and coordinate a scientific project in genomics, but with the real aim to strengthen economic growth in the biotechnology sector and promote integration among new and old member states of the European Economic Community.
GIUDITTA PAROLINI 