Gustavo's talk is organised by the Computational Humanities Research group in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London. The talk uses Wikipedia links as cultural networks to measure hidden relationships and reveal historical patterns and new insights.

Wikipedia is one of the most remarkable collective efforts, where millions of anonymous editors work independently to build the most significant source of knowledge humanity has ever created. Beyond the explicit knowledge presented in its articles, a vast amount of implicit learning emerges from the dense network of internal links connecting people, ideas, and works. This extensive network (~173 million connections in the English version) can be represented as a directed graph and has been used in several studies, ranging from computing semantic relatedness to natural language processing. In this talk, we present a mathematical approach to transform the directed network of internal links in Wikipedia into a weighted, undirected network that reveals and quantifies subtle connections among individuals, places, oeuvres, and ideas. The methodology is based on calculating the structural relationship between each pair of nodes using the normalised Google distance, which allows us to map and analyse how specific elements of culture interact with one another. As a proof of concept, we will examine two cases: a) the interdisciplinary cultural network connecting art, science, and philosophy in Europe during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; and b) the networks of prominent writers over the last three centuries. We will observe how emerging patterns reveal themselves and enable us to predict future behaviours. The results align with well-established historical knowledge and, more importantly, offer new insights into how cultural elements within these networks interact.

Speaker:

Gustavo Ariel Schwartz is a physicist and writer. After receiving his PhD in Physics from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 2001, he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden). He then moved to the Donostia International Physics Center (Spain) to continue his research. Since 2008, he has been a scientist at the National Spanish Research Council (CSIC), where he has conducted his research at the Material Physics Centre in San Sebastián. He has published more than seventy scientific articles. He has co-authored the theatre play, The Interview, which premiered in San Sebastián in 2013. He also co-edited the collective work #Nodos, in which nearly 90 scientists, writers, artists, and scholars from all over the world explore the possibilities of transdisciplinary knowledge. The English edition has been published by Intellect Press in the UK. In 2019, he published Creativium, a transdisciplinary project that analyses and portrays scientific creativity.