Andrea Nanetti

Interactive Global Histories: For a New Information Environment to Increase the Understanding of Historical Processes

The paper presents the results of an experimental case study on intercontinental trade, diplomacy, conflicts and other interactions among cities, nations and continents during Late Middle Age and Early Renaissance (1205-1533 CE). This study is based on Andrea Nanettis ongoing research project Engineering Historical Memory (EHM) and conducted at Nanyang Technological University by Andrea Nanetti, Siew Ann Cheong, and Mikhail Filippov. The two main aims are to test: 1) ontologies to organize texts, images, and sounds in a relational database suitable to develop a systemic approach to the study of complex interactions among key subjects of the historical landscape, and 2) coherent narratives from growing historical data and metadata that can be tested at the same level of rigor as scientific hypotheses and theories. The vision is that the generation of such narratives, supported by a new coherent ontology, automatically and in a scalable way, can revolutionize the practice of historical studies.

Maps as Knowledge Aggregators: from Renaissance Italy Fra Mauro to Web Search Engines

Mediaeval and Renaissance maps of the world were and worked as knowledge aggregators. The cosmographers identified, selected and re-edited information about hundreds of places from a variety of literary, iconographic and oral sources, and synoptically re-organized them in place names, cartouches, and drawings to be put on a map. This selection/aggregation process transformed the mappa mundi into a visual encyclopaedia (i.e. an all-around learning and thinking tool), where each geographical entry was able to generate narratives as a data gateway and an information hub for customs, commodities, and rulers of different peoples of the world. If we infer that the Renaissance people asked to the cosmographers to learn about the world as we go to search engines to find what we want, the reverse engineering of these works (as exemplified in this paper for the mid-fifteenth-century world map by Fra Mauro Camaldolese) can help to draw the connection between the traditional way to aggregate knowledge as a product (e.g. Fra Mauros mappa mundi) and the modern way of using search engines and related internet services (i.e. their map services) to serve a similar purpose but in a better and more dynamic manner, placing crucial question, such as: How the same networks/people can bring new wealth and development, or war and poverty? Which are the dynamics of sustainability in international mechanisms?

Knowledge evolution in physics research: An analysis of bibliographic coupling networks

Even as we advance the frontiers of physics knowledge, our understanding of how this knowledge evolves remains at the descriptive levels of Popper and Kuhn. Using the American Physical Society (APS) publications data sets, we ask in this paper how new knowledge is built upon old knowledge. We do so by constructing year-to-year bibliographic coupling networks, and identify in them validated communities that represent different research fields. We then visualize their evolutionary relationships in the form of alluvial diagrams, and show how they remain intact through APS journal splits. Quantitatively, we see that most fields undergo weak Popperian mixing, and it is rare for a field to remain isolated/undergo strong mixing. The sizes of fields obey a simple linear growth with recombination. We can also reliably predict the merging between two fields, but not for the considerably more complex splitting. Finally, we report a case study of two fields that underwent repeated merging and splitting around 1995, and how these Kuhnian events are correlated with breakthroughs on Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), quantum teleportation, and slow light. This impact showed up quantitatively in the citations of the BEC field as a larger proportion of references from during and shortly after these events.

Toward a Complexity Framework for Heritage Futures: Famagusta, its Armenian Church and SHIFT

As a working definition, we consider heritage as the treasure of human experiences (i.e., the comprehensive storage system of human knowledge and values). To make heritage organized, accessible, and useful in our increasingly complex society we envision a new science of heritage, seen as a state-of-the-art multidisciplinary domain, which investigates and pioneers integrated action plans and solutions in response to, and in anticipation of, the challenges arising from heritage issues in society: conservation, capturing, access, interpretation, and management. We propose, in this chapter, to observe heritage through the lens of complexity and study emergent properties in human-heritage-landscape systems that typically have many strongly interacting players. Under the programmatic title SHIFT (Sustainable Heritage Impact Factor Theory), we aim to investigate and identify how heritage data can be distilled into knowledge, so as to support political decision-making with scientific methods and evidence to reinforce the identities and values of all stakeholders.

Linguistic Contact in Prehistoric Italy: At The Origins of the Placename Imola

Abstract This paper explores possible connections between the Indo-European roots *yem-/*jem- and *am- (*me-) and the Etruscan stem am- through the analysis and reconstruction of the pre-Latin etymology of the Italian placename Imola (Bologna, Emilia-Romagna). The evaluation of plausible links between Indo-European (Italic and, especially, Celtic) and Etruscan in this area, in the specific field of historical toponomastics, could allow relevant considerations inherently in the notions of reuse and refunctionalization of roots pertaining to different languages and linguistic families in the (mainly Prehistoric or Proto-historic) toponymy of border areas. The placename Imola is, therefore, reconstructed through a “convergent” methodology that takes into account the possibility of different and heterogeneous influences in the naming process. The work starts from the analysis of the Indo-European root *yem-/*jem- inferring the possibility of contacts between Indo-Europeans and Etruscans in the area of the inhabited center. The proposal of possible linguistic interexchange envisages the hypothesis of a semantic alignment between the Indo-European root *yem-/*jem- and the Etruscan stem am- or an analogy between the two bases and the Indo-European theme *am- (*me-). The conclusions (a plausible contact and alignment between Indo-European and Etruscan in a border area) of this paper could be relevant also in the field of historical semantics and in the re-interpretation of Etruscan stem am-. The study, therefore, highlights the possibility of contacts and interexchange, in border areas, between different languages and linguistic families.