Tom caught on tape!

Last week I presented at a workshop organised by Johannes Preiser-Kapeller in Vienna and Johannes already made the videos of that workshop available! That’s lightning fast academic work for you 🙂

You can watch the videos below. Johannes gave an introduction after which I presented a 40 minute keynote talk. Next up was Mihailo Popović talking about the historical geography of Byzantium, followed by Johannes Preiser-Kapeller and Ekaterini Mitsiou presenting their recent work on social networks of Byzantium. The workshop was hosted at the Institute for Byzantine Studies (Austrian Academy of Sciences) in Vienna and was titled “Connecting the dots. The analysis of networks and the study of the past (Archaeology and History)”.

Here are the videos:

Introduction (Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, IBF)

Tom Brughmans (Univ. Southampton), “Complex Networks in Archaeology: Urban Connectivity in Roman Southern Spain”, part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Mihailo Popović (IBF, Austrian Academy): “Networking the historical geography of Byzantium”

Johannes Preiser-Kapeller (IBF, Austrian Academy): “Social networks of Byzantium (part 1)”

Ekaterini Mitsiou (IBF, Austrian Academy): “Social networks of Byzantium (part 2)”

Play with Digital Humanities attendees

For the Digital Humanities conference being held 19-22 June Elijah Meeks made a nice network of all attendants and their institutions. You can explore the network by zooming in and out, as well as trying out a radial visualisation. The University of Southampton is represented by our own Leif Isaksen!

The network consists of 621 points and 734 lines. The nodes represent attendants, institutions and papers. These are all linked up by drawing the necessary lines between attendants and their institutions and the papers they will present. The network is very fragmented, consisting of many small components (like the one Leif is part of for example). To me this seems to mean that most papers are presented by people of the same institutions or of a very limited number of institutions, and that many institutions are represented by just a few members.

There are two larger components however. One of them consists almost exclusively of researchers from the Centre of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. They mainly co-author papers internally and only in a few cases with researchers from other institutions. The largest component on the other hand consists of many different institution, the most prominent of which are University College London, University of Alberta, Indiana University, Virtual Cities/Digital Histories and Stanford University. The researchers of these institutions are (weakly) tied together by co-authorship of several papers.

Does this network seem to represent different academic communities? The largest component seems to be mainly US-based authors so maybe there is a geographical logic where US-scholars with existing US-collaborations are more inclined to present their work in California than researchers from other countries. But why is University College London part of this US-component (with a very weak link though) and King’s College is not, and why do these two prominent UK institutions not have any co-authored papers?

All these fascinating questions just come up in my head when looking at this network. These things are really fun to explore and force you to take an alternative perspective on things. You can see the academic networks at work! Curious what next year’s DH network will look like.

Click here for the original article.

Slides of presentations online folks

You can now download the slides from my recent presentations in Newcastle, Southampton, Leuven, Budapest and my presentation tomorrow in Vienna from my bibliography page. I know they are all very similar, but there are some slight variations. Task: find the 10 differences between them 🙂

If you want to read the research underlying this you will have to wait a bit longer because we are still writing it out. But you can always check out the abstracts (added as description on Scribd). And if you really can’t wait just send me an e-mail and I will give you a sneak-preview!

And finally I would like to give you a last-minute reminder of the workshop in Vienna tomorrow titled “Connecting the dots. The analysis of networks and the study of the past (Archaeology and History)”. It’s a half-day Workshop on 10 June 2011 at the Institut für Byzanzforschung (IBF), Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Check out the invitation here.

Tomorrow AHCN conference in Budapest

A last-minute reminder of the Arts, Humanities and Complex Networks conference to be held tomorrow at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest. The list of contributors and topics is ridiculously wide, this will definitely be an awesomely inspiring event. I will be presenting a talk on the potential and issues surrounding complex networks in archaeology.

The organisers told me the venue is completely booked out so it’s probably not worth impulsively buying a plane ticket to Hungary if you do not have a conference ticket yet. I have also been told the presentations will be filmed and put online, so you can all enjoy that in a while. Last year’s edition was a great success and you can see the movies and read the papers on last year’s website.

Download the preliminary program here