Please distribute to others who may be interested... You are hereby invited to a seminar in our twelfth interdisciplinary series on Evolution, Complexity and Cognition <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108> (ECCO 2015-2016)
Time: Friday December 11 , 14h-16h Place: *D.1.07 , VUB* ------------------------------ The World Wide Lab: Studying Self-Organization Using Digital Social Science Mark Burdick (Midstate College, Illinois ) Abstract: The ‘World Wide Lab’ refers to a scientific approach which utilizes the open Internet as a research space for ‘virtual’ field studies; but this is a dizzying space of tremendous complexity. To start to delineate significance from noise and to simplify the tangled picture to its most consequential attributes, an idea of the underlying ‘physics’ is necessary. Formulations from selforganizing systems science give promise in their descriptions of how structures evolve out of many, seemingly chaotic, unconnected phenomena. In this lecture, I will discuss how techniques from the emerging field of Digital Social Science can be used to study the evolution of real world groups and ideologies by analyzing their web-based corollaries. I will highlight a need for research into the application of concepts such as cybernetics, memetics, cascades, and stigmergy to web-based longitudinal network and content analyses. I will conclude with a look ahead at the potential uses and/or effects of a tool built from these foundations. Biography: Mark Burdick earned his Bachelor of Science from Purdue University, Indiana, in Psychology and his Master of Science from Twente University, The Netherlands, in Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Society. His research interests include the evolution of worldviews and ideologies, web-‐based sociological tools, network science, self-‐organizing systems, and predictive analytics. Currently, he is the instructor of philosophy, ethics, and sociology courses at Midstate College in Illinois while conducting independent digital social science research on extremist groups and the political blogosphere. ------------------------------ Upcoming Seminars *Dec. 18 * Jos Jacobs *Chaos and Order * See also the ECCO/GBI calendar <https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=azMyN252aWluM2JoMnU3MXY5OGt2ZzliOGdAZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ> . You can add this calendar to your calendar application through here <https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/k327nviin3bh2u71v98kvg9b8g%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics> More info about the ECCO seminar program: http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108 -- Evo Evo Busseniers - Seminar Coordinator ECCO Group (VUB) <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/1> Email: [email protected] Website: http://vub.academia.edu/EvoBusseniers <http://be.linkedin.com/in/weaver9/>
