Unfolding History

Trying to give new impulse to this project: let us use this site to share info and tools!

Brainstorming

Some of the ideas after today's meeting:

• History Epistasis:
  • How does an event affect previously existing events?
  • Can we make a network and check out how deep a wave of modifications propagates.
• Reaction time after an event happens.
• Make an agent based model.
• Take empirical data from the wikipedia.
• Agents biasing History.
  • Do conflicts in a country reflect on their account of History?
• External vs. internal history: the cost of inner encoding vs. relying on the environment to encode important traits.

Please, post

Also, Joshua proposed some tools that can be handy to detect a change in the editing regime of an event. I just post some key-words I could catch up. If someone could add some description or some bibliography on that?

Scripts

It is very easy and fast to parse files with python. This links to a dropbox folder containing a few sample data manually cropped from the wikipedia and three python scripts to parse the data.

Tools

The wikipedia has got a large collection of tools to extract statistics from the site. After a loose search, nothing was found that resembles what I (Luíño) had in mind. There are very interesting models and fits to data, though, of how an article grows in time or how much this or that user affects a wiki. If we wanted to do something with the wikipedia eventually, we should check out that what we need is has not already been invented. Someone up to navigate through these tools and tells us about them?

Literature

The following more or less related papers have been posted to the project by different colleagues:

• The Evolution of God -- by Pablo_Galindo.
• A model on religion diversification that can be very handy if we decided to make a model -- by Cesar.
• Network approach to history -- by Andrea.
• A nice project by Carol Strohecker on narrative unfolding: Tired of Giving In.
• Brian Keegan wrote his dissertation on something pretty similar, and has done some other work on Wikipedia edits of current events. --David
• Herman & Chomsky's Propaganda model developed in Manufacturing Consent (1988). A really great documentary roughly based on the book is also available on youtube.

Surely more people has approached the problem of History formation from a Complex Systems approach. It would be interesting to go over the literature and maybe find some insight. Someone would like to do that? Elisa