Research Seminar December 9th: Matteo Valleriani - Detecting Epistemic Communities in the Frame of Early Modern Cosmology: A Research in Computational History

Matteo Valleriani 

Detecting Epistemic Communities in the Frame of Early Modern Cosmology: A Research in Computational History

On the basis of the corpus of all early modern printed editions of commentaries on the “Sphere” of Sacrobosco, the lecture shows how to reconstruct the transformation process - and its mechanisms - undergone by the treatise, and so to explore the evolutionary path of the scientific system pivoted around cosmological knowledge: the shared scientific identity of Europe, between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. This historical argument is based on an analysis of data that follows precepts of the physics of the complex systems. The sources are analyzed on the textual level. From a methodological point of view, however, the lecture will also show how data such as illustrations and computational tables are extracted by means of machine learning and how this data will be included in the historical research.