I am a media sociologist and science studies scholar, currently a postdoctoral researcher and the coordinator for events at c:o/re. I studied Political Science and History at the TU Dresden and hold a PhD in Sociology from the University of Bonn. Before joining c:o/re, I was Fellow in Residence at the Kolleg Friedrich Nietzsche in Weimar, research associate in a BMBF-funded project on stem cell governance at the University of Duisburg-Essen, and part of the DFG research group Practicing Evidence – Evidencing Practice in Bonn, respectively. In Spring 2024, I was a visiting research fellow at NYU’s College of Arts & Science.
My current research revolves around the emergence and institutionalization of preprint communication in high-energy physics. I’m interested in tracing how an originally informal and casual means of sharing notes and manuscripts with peers in the 1940s gradually turned into a formalized practice, particularly through the work of libraries and their innovations in information technologies to deal with the so-called grey literature. For this purpose, I investigate the establishment of different systems to sort, register, index, and distribute preprint information at the libraries of accelerator laboratories in Europe and the USA (CERN, DESY, and SLAC) through archival research and interviews with principle actors. Other interests of mine include the agency and mediality of scientific software and the history of computer graphics in chemistry.
Selected Publications
Roth, P. H. (2026). How Libraries Classified Physics Preprints Before arXiv and set the Stage for Distinguishing Between Insiders and Outsiders. Nature Reviews Physics 8. 188–189. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-026-00932-x (preprint: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.26590)
Roth, P. H. (2026). Formalizing Informal Communication: An Archaeology of the Early Pre-Web Preprint Infrastructure at CERN. Minerva. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-026-09639-w
Petronius, C., Phillip H. Roth, Alin Olteanu (2025). A pandemic of desire: the entanglement of social and biomedical contagion on social media during COVID-19. Information, Communication & Society, 1–17.
Roth, P. H., Alin Olteanu, Ana María Guzmán Olmos, Stefan Böschen (eds.) (2025). Making Media Futures. Machine Visions and Technological Imaginations (Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture). London: Routledge.
Roth, P. H., Frédéric Wieber, Alexandre Hocquet, Alin Olteanu (2024). Juggling Molecules. Towards an Archaeology of Computational Tools in Chemistry. Cybernetics and Human Knowing 31(3–4), 129–144
Roth, P. H. (2023). 4 Disziplinen und Kulturen der Wissenschaft. In D. Kaldewey (Ed.), Wissenschaftsforschung (pp. 75–92). De Gruyter.
Roth, P. H. (2022). Medicine as Science: The Making of Disciplinary Identity from Scientific Medicine to Biomedicine. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG.
Selected Talks
“Preprints, Libraries, and the Women Who Built the Physics Communication Infrastructure in the 20th Century,” Shifting Perspectives: Diversity, Geographies, and Possibilities in the Physical Sciences, Symposium at the ESHS/HSS Joint Meeting, University of Edinburgh, 12–16 July 2026.
“Migrating Bibliographical Data across the Ocean in Mid-20th Century Particle Physics,” annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) Technologies of Migration – Migrating Technologies, University of Luxembourg, 9–11 October 2025.
“Preprint Culture: A Case in the Mediatization of Scientific Communication,” research seminar, CWTS Leiden, 28 February 2025.
“The Physics Preprints Exchange Network,” 2025 ECREA Communication History Workshop Communication Networks Before and After the Web, CERN, Geneva, 5–7 February 2025.
“Juggling Molecules. Raster and Vector Displays in the History of Computational Chemistry” (with Frédéric Wieber, Alin Olteanu, Alexandre Hocquet), Writing the History of Computer Visualizations in Science: Production, Use, Circulation (1940–1990), Écoles de Haute Études en Science Sociales, Paris, 2–3 May 2024.
“Preprint Culture. Towards the History and Sociology of a Communication Format in Late-Modern Science”, I2SOS-Kolloquium, University of Bielefeld, 21 November 2023.
“Preprints, PDFs, and Technologies of Idealization in Scientific Publishing”, SHARP annual online conference Affordances and Interfaces, 26.–29. June 2023.
“Media Technologies and Material Configurations of Scientific Communication” (with Alin Olteanu), 4S/ESOCITE international conference Reunion – Recuperation – Reconfiguration, Cholula Mexico, 7.–10. December 2022.
“Scientific Communication in the Software Age. Sorting out Materiality, Community and Infrastructure”, c:o/re Workshop New Horizons in the Social Study of Science and Software, Käte Hamburger Kolleg Aachen: Cultures of Research (c:o/re), 8.–9. November 2022.
“The Entanglement of Models and Software. Tools and Representations in Computational Chemistry” (with Alexandre Hocquet, Frédéric Wieber, Alin Olteanu), IACS 4 international conference Semiotic Complexities. Theory & Analysis, RWTH Aachen University, 15.–18. Juni 2022.
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