Simon DeDeo (Indiana University and SFI External Professor)
Abstract. When did the French Revolution become revolutionary? How did pre-20th Century London manage violence? How did Charles Darwin synthesize Victorian science to write the Origin of the Species? Newly-digitized historical archives provide the raw material that can answer questions like these, and information theory provides new ways to quantify the interactions between human creativity and cultural evolution. I’ll present recent collaborative research, with scientists and scholars in the humanities, in three case studies described above. I’ll show how we can leverage the hard labor of digital archivists to get a new picture of history and, often, a glimpse of the minds—elite and non-elite—that made it.