Human Activity. From the Renaissance to the 21st Century

the increasing availability of massive amounts of quantitative data is fundamentally changing our perspective and research. Understanding impressive amounts of data – including bibliographies, inventory and research databases, Flickr images of historic sites, scanned books, click-streams of literature downloads, and other linked data is just as transformative for humanities, as the ideas of quantum mechanics were for physics in the beginning of the twentieth century. In our hunt for general patterns and laws that characterize complex systems we find overarching themes, such as the one illustrated in figure 1, showing the reception of ancient Roman monuments in Western Renaissance documents (left), placed next to the the very same monuments as they appear in modern scholarly literature (right). The overall similarity between these two maps is obvious and rather amazing. Both show that most documents (represented as brown nodes) depict or mention only a small number of monuments (given in blue), whereas a few documents point to a disproportionally large number of monuments, representing reviews or large catalogues. That is the reference patterns of art historians appear to follow the same hub dominated scale-free topology as the one characterizing the www, scientific citations, or the human cell. Another common feature is the fact that most nodes of the network are reachable from every other node with a very few hops. Obviously, these maps are driven by the interests, judgements and actions of each author who placed themselves on the map by referring to a shared core set of monuments, which allows for communication with peers, without a central control. Human Activity From the Renaissance to the 21st Century 86