DIEP seminar by Pádraig MacCarron
A key concept in complex systems is the idea of emergent properties. Complex systems have a wide range of applications outside of the realm of tradition science. In this talk, complex networks are used to study shared-cultural literature.
Every human culture we have encountered has its own myths, epics, and legends. Hence, mythology can be viewed as an emergent property of a culture. However, the vast majority of myths and epics have been lost. For example, in the Greek Trojan Cycle, only two of eight epics have survived in full: the Iliad and the Odyssey. This talk will look at ancient-Greek, medieval-Irish, and some modern literature to assess what impact the loss of data has on the social networks extracted from those corpora. By using modern literature with relatively complete social networks, we can attempt to quantify how many characters and interactions have been lost, and methods to make predictions to mitigate data loss will be discussed.
Pádraig MacCarron is Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Limerick. He obtained a PhD from Coventry University on comparing the structural properties of social networks in narratives. After this he worked in the University of Oxford on social networks in a large mobile phone database. His work is interdisciplinary and has recently worked with colleagues in the Psychology Department on identifying polarisation in attitude networks, with the Law Department on criminal social networks and the Health Research Institute on trust partnership networks.
His current work is on identifying structural properties of social networks in order to develop realistic models of social phenomena such as how communities form and fragment in social systems.
If you wish to attend this seminar online, please send an email to r.lier@uva.nl to receive the zoom-link.