STLab:News/11

Seminar by Dr. Jack Owens, September 21st

on September 21th at 15.00 Dr. Jack Owens (Idaho State University, Geographically-Integrated History Laboratory) [1] will give a seminar on:

"Understanding Social Networks within Complex, Nonlinear Systems: Geographically-Integrated History and Dynamics GIS"

Where: ISTC-CNR, Via San Martino della Battaglia 44 (near central station), first floor, Piaget room

Slides are downloadable from here

[1] http://idahostate.academia.edu/JBJackOwens

Abstract

Owens will present the model he uses to frame research questions about strategic interactions within human social networks. The talk will focus on his new project, which has just been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) through the agency’s “transformative research” program “Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation”. This project constitutes a multidisciplinary research agenda of a virtual organization of historians, geographers, computer scientists, and mathematicians to share historical social science data and develop geographically integrated frameworks to address complex, dynamic, nonlinear systems and social networks. Through multidisciplinary collaboration, the project will fuse qualitative and quantitative data to connect humans, events, and environments, and through such connections to form historical narratives within and across geographic spaces. The project’s ultimate goal is to better infuse computational thinking into the historical social sciences through computational innovation and narrative knowledge creation to revolutionize research outcomes in these disciplines with a shift to the paradigm of Geographically-Integrated History. Narrative constitutes a unique form of knowledge and communication, which will better contribute than other types of argument to an understanding of significant phenomena such as the emergence of new forms of entrepreneurship, gender and political interactions, and cultural expression across a vast geographic landscape. The project’s developments in Dynamics GIS (geographic information systems) and related information technologies will provide the backbone for understanding complex historical social systems with three components that define the geographically-integrated history paradigm: (1) the history of any place is shaped in significant ways by the way the place is connected to other places and by the changes in these connections over time; (2) historical periods are complex, dynamic, nonlinear systems that are spatially large, and in more recent centuries, global in extension, and these systems sometimes become unstable, leading to a phase transition, bifurcation, and the organization of new systems; and (3) within such systems, people and places are connected by social networks in a self-organizing fashion. Focusing on the First Global Age (1400-1800), the project will transform historical research with computational thinking on (1) new means for the representation of data for organizing, storing, manipulating, and recovering them for exploration using computational tools; (2) new spatial-temporal GIS for the visualization and analysis of real world dynamics; (3) new tools for data harmonization and text mining; (4) new approaches to the use of information that is vague, uncertain, and incomplete and of qualitative data within a computational context; (5) new forms of modeling to represent the inferences of domain experts; and (6) new metaphors beyond the map and animation-based visualization for temporal GIS.

The project frames the First Global Age as a complex, dynamic, nonlinear system. Within this system, there were periodic disruptions of social networks, including those caused by the expansion of opportunities and of the system itself and by interaction with coupled natural systems. To maintain system stability, actors, both men and women, had to counter the disruptions by constituting more robust networks, but the resulting denser webs of connections permitted even more widespread future cascades of disturbances. In the later eighteenth century, such a cascade of innovation disrupted one or more of the system’s “control” variables and initiated a transition to a new system, the Second Global Age in which we now live. In their narration of revealing geographically-integrated stories, historians of the First Global Age can combine a social network approach to move from data to an understanding of a complex system, and in doing so, they will offer a world historical account that addresses larger issues of system and network dynamics and provides a solution to the common criticism of world-systems analysis that it ignores the relationships between the local and the larger system.