Technological discussions in iron and steel, Carol Siri Johnson, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Dept of Humanities Peter B. Meyer Research Economist, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics * SHOT conference, Las Vegas, Oct 13, 2006 * Views expressed here do not reflect official policies or measurements of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Our questions We analyze the text of an American engineering journal (TAIME) looking for: Evidence of new technological “paradigm” as mass production steel is becoming established Different expectations of the future: social “uncertainty”

U.S. steel production quantity and price Source is Historical Statistics of the U.S. (1975)

Mid-19 th Century Ironworks Lukens Steel, PA, circa 1895, just before being torn down Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library

Late 19 th Century Ironworks Birmingham, Alabama. Courtesy IA, Robert Gordon, the Smithsonian

Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers (TAIME) We put scans of online at

The American Institute of Mining Engineers and the Engineering and Mining Journal and Knowledge Transfer

Data Exploration: Paper Length and Contents

Data Exploration: Author Biographies

Kuhn’s hypothesis An established scientific paradigm has a agreed-on vocabulary Covering its esoteric theory and subject precisely As a paradigm is developing, communication involves translation And invention and exploring alternative definitions “The price is often sentences of great length and complexity.” e.g.: “what I mean by steel is... “. In TAIME, we see glossaries Mass production steel was a developing technological paradigm in Bessemer steel, open-hearth steel were new Big Steel – centralized, high volume, capital-intensive production We look at how lengths of articles change in this developing literature. Possibly, articles on a topic get shorter with time. TAIME articles got longer over time; iron-related ones less so.

Expressions of literal uncertainty We computed fraction of words in each article in: iron-related terms: “hot blast”, “Bessemer”, “puddling”, “open hearth”, “Siemens”, “Martin”, “spiegel” and the fraction of words with the string "uncertain“ These mechanically measure iron-relevance and the author’s reference to literal uncertainty. These counts across the 712 articles are correlated:  A TAIME article with “uncertain” will tend to have slightly more iron-related words than a random article.

Possible Words to Count ? ambiguity answer (s, ed, ing) argument (s) ask (s, ed, ing) belief (s) certain (ty) chance confusion criticism definite difficult dispute (s, un) doubt (s, ful, fullness, less, lessly) error (s) evidence experiment (s, al, ing) if inquire (d, ing) inquiries inquiry investigate (s, ed, ing) know (un, n. ledge) opinion (s) perhaps probability problem (s) query question (s, ed, ing, able) resolve (s, d, ing) right risk (s, ed) test true trust (dis, mis, s) truth (s) (un) certain (ty) valid (ity) whether wrong

Word Counts

Expressions of Uncertainty

Scientific Expressions

Expressions of Uncertainty – Steel Articles

Scientific Expressions – Steel Articles

Layers of production, advancing Iron and steel, Iron and coal mining Blast furnaces making pig iron Bessemer and open hearth steel production plants Railroads (transportation) Business process (cost accounting, personnel departments, time setting, timekeeping) Earlier, more basic, "upstream" levels Materials science and solid state physics Chip design and electrical engineering Microcomputers Applications software (word processors, spreadsheets, databases, chip design software) Web software and business process (e-commerce, auctions, search engines) Production of information technology goods, in recent decades Later, “downstream" levels In both cases there were feedback processes by which downstream advances affected earlier stages of production

Communication and Cooperation – Groups of People Working Together