[Air-L] Mapping Culture using Complex Networks: Entangling Science and the Humanities

[Daniel Chavez Heras]

Dear AIR listers

I am pleased to invite you to the below event next week. Please consider circulating this opportunity to your students and networks.

🗓️ 28 April 2026 16:30 to 18:00 BST
📍 King's College London, Strand Campus and 🌐 online


Mapping Culture using Complex Networks: Entangling Science and the Humanities

Wikipedia is one of the most remarkable collective efforts, where millions of anonymous editors work independently to build one of the most significant sources 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.

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.

Register in person (London): https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/mapping-culture-using-complex-networks-entangling-science-and-the-humanities

Register online if you are joining remotely: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/73e1647c-6395-4cd3-8895-4157dddd74a5@8370cf14-16f3-4c16-b83c-724071654356


This event is organised by the Computational Humanities Research group<https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/computational-humanities-research-group> in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London.

For questions, contact:
Dr Daniel Chávez Heras<https://movingpixel.net/>
Lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing
Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London

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