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1,216 news posts in Mind and body

Humanities

06 Mar 2017

Building a Facebook of the Middle Ages

Could ‘big data’ of the past allow us to build an historical social network? The Venice Time Machine Project is finding out — by Kevin Baumer Meet Battista Nani, the Venetian ambassador to France from 1643-1668. By using new technologies to digitize, transcribe and index over 1000 years of historical documents — enough data to fill 80km of shelf space — we can now reconstruct parts of his life in much more detail. Documents such as tax returns, letters and genealogical records are now digitized and searchable, allowing Ambassador Nani to be connected to his family members, friends and colleagues in a larger network.  Nani’s life trajectory emerges out of this mass of Venetian documents, through a constantly growing network of relations with particular places (the houses he owned, the places he lived or visited) and people (family and professional relations). Expand this network to cover all residents mentioned in the Venetian archives, and you have a snapshot of a social network of the time — a ‘Facebook of the Past’. Frederic Kaplan, Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Digital Humanities, presented an early version of the Venice Time Machine Project’s vision in a 2013 TED Talk, which has since […]

Life sciences

06 Mar 2017

In politics, does rudeness win?

A new research project wants to track if our politics is getting ruder or whether it’s the media – stupid! — Tanya Petersen “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!” This is how US President, Donald Trump kicked off the new year – a welcome to 2017 tweet with an obvious dig. Was this rude or perhaps just churlish? While a fascinating new research project about to get underway at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne won’t be studying in detail the political musings of Donald Trump it will be trying to assess whether our politics has become ruder over time. And to do this research open data is key. Led by Dr Robert West and graduate student, Seth Vanderwiltthe, the project will start by looking at the US congressional records – an un-sampled record of what people say in a certain environment. Dr West says these are the prime example of open data. They are records that have existed from the beginning, they have always been public and now they are digitally available for researchers. […]