A Digital History of the Internationalization of Patent Systems

As debates on patents covering COVID-19 vaccines have recalled, intellectual property rights are of great relevance on a global scale. Our ongoing research project “The Internationalization of Patent Systems: From Patent Cultures to Global Intellectual Property” investigates how patents have been transformed, albeit incompletely, from a local instrument for protecting innovation to such global intellectual property rights. This presentation will discuss how digital methods help scrutinize the history of this internationalization in new ways, complementing the study of intergovernmental agreements. Combining a large corpus of digitized patents (around 4 millions documents) with textual analysis and computer vision techniques allows us to explore the networks of texts and images emerging from border-crossing patenting practice. In the presentation, we will focus on the challenges of applying these techniques on our corpus, on the choices made in response to these challenges, on their methodological implications, and on the new insights that this process brings about.