Cultural Interaction

Abstract
Network science and the discipline of art history share a common root in Leibniz, which perhaps remains surprising. As early as the 1920s, this shared foundation sparked researchers around Ernst Cassirer and Aby Warburg to study systems of relationships of order, similarity, and all kinds of relations in general. Decades of consequent data collection eventually allowed us in the 2000s to exemplify the emergence of complex network properties in art and cultural history at scale, in bipartite networks of documentation, and the associated multiplicity of networks more generally. Doing so, we established evidence that quantitative analysis and qualitative inquiry of cultural phenomena must go hand in hand. Now, the same shared foundation further promises to bridge the discrete topology of networks with the continuous topology of multidimensional meaning spaces, with the latter already theorized by Cassirer as 'pure mathematical', implicitly applied by Warburg in the so-called Mnemosyne Atlas, and now routinely used at scale to capture (visual) family resemblance across all disciplines using deep machine learning and/orother approaches of embedding. This talk recapitulates some essential theoretical aspects and empirical evidence that can serve to constitute asystematic science of cultural complexity, which in turn may re-establish itself as the missing stratum of complexity science, where more is different than the sum of socio-cultural interactions. In other words, a network scienceof tangible and intangible cultural products emerges as feasible and highly worthwhile.

About the Speaker
Maximilian Schich is a Professor for Cultural Data Analytics and ERA Chair holder at Tallinn University in Estonia (2020-2024). Max holds a Magister Artium in Art History, Classical Archaeology, and General Psychologyfrom Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and a PhD in Art History from Humboldt-University in Berlin. Further multidisciplinary postdoctoral formationin Network Science at Northeastern University and Computational Social Science at ETH Zurich builds on previous professional experience with large cultural graph databases. In research, Max routinely combines critical and creative aesthetics, qualitative inquiry, quantification, and computation. Max was named Wittkower Fellow (2023/24) at Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max-Planck-Institute forArt History), acknowledging his pioneering applications of network analysis inart research, particularly regarding the city of Rome.

Register here: https://iu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_kj-cg_saTmi4oQERGNX8Lg#/registration