## 1 Introduction
The details of the invention were communicated and demonstrated by an evolving team of co-authors in multiple publications and the filing of two patents in the period between 2006 (the first publication claiming the use of SWGs as a new waveguiding mechanism [10]) and 2018 when the PRO received the NRC 2018 Excellence in Research Award, initiated and coordinated the publication of a review article in _Nature_[11]. This is the foremost international scientific journal in the world. The PRO was recognized as the lead inventor of a new type of optical waveguide mechanism based on the application of SWGs (US patent 7,376,308 B2, 2008 and US patent 8,503,839 B2, 2013). A photonic metamaterial is engineered by a unique one-step lithography approach, which allows the synthesis of a new meta-material. This is a type of material that does not exist in nature but has properties that are highly beneficial for the design and fabrication of advanced micro-photonic and nanophotonic devices. The PRO and his colleagues demonstrated the implementation of the new optical waveguide principle in multiple devices such as fiber-chip couplers, crossings, multiplexers, ultra-fast optical switches, athermal waveguides, sensors, polarization rotators, transceiver hybrids, and ultra-broadband interference couplers. The impact of this invention has been widely recognized, and subwavelength structures are now considered key building blocks for the next generation of integrated photonic circuits. The preliminary details of the invention of the SWG photonic metamaterials suggest the adoption of an ANT-driven methodology shaped around the following research questions:  
* Who were the key actors that affected the pursuit of the SWG photonic metamaterial invention, and how did the research group form? * Can topic modeling of the contributions and novelty claims articulated in the published research articles help identify some of the key non-human actants in the invention of the SWG photonic metamaterials? * How did the entanglement between human and non-human actors affect the course of action leading to the invention? The adoption of the ANT perspective in the present study has several distinctive features. First, it focuses on the traditional description of the contingency and the unpredictability of the invention process but enhances its scope by highlighting the role of the personal factor--the perseverance and ingenuity of the key inventor--in driving the course of action and affecting the innovation outcome. This enhancement refines ANT's traditional understanding of an unconditional symmetry between human and non-human actors [7; 8; 9], which is highly relevant to the context of real-life scientific inventions and needs to be studied in more depth. Second, our study demonstrates the possibility of adopting a Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach--topic modeling--as a semantic technology that could help identify key actants in the pursuit of scientific inventions. The potential of topic modeling as a semantic technology is enhanced by the specific nature of the corpus of text documents on which it is applied. This is the contribution and novelty claims in the published research articles documenting the gradual shaping of the invention. Third, the study distinguishes between the traditional explanatory (descriptive) way of applying ANT to examine how a specific invention has actually happened and a more proactive (anticipatory) way of applying ANT that could help in the identification of future actors and actants that may affect the ultimate adoption of the invention [5]. The intention is to explore how the explanatory application of the ANT framework could inform the development of insights about the potential future adoption of the invention. The article is structured as follows. It provides a literature review on ANT in the context of scientific inventions and innovation management, the topic modeling text analytics approach, and its potential to enhance ANT.