Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks: A Leonardo E-book

Leonardo/ISAST is pleased to announce the publication of the e-book and web companion Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks. To learn more about the project, listen to Episode 17 of MIT Press Journals Podcast Series.

About AHCN
Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks is both the theme and title of a satellite symposium series adjacent to NetSci – The International School and Conference on Network Science. The symposium series was initiated and chaired since 2010 by Maximilian Schich and co-chaired by Isabel Meirelles and Roger Malina. Local co-chairs included Tijana Stepanovic (2011), Cristián Huepe (2012), and Meredith Tromble (2014).

The symposium highlights arts and humanities as an interesting source of data, where the combined experience of arts, humanities research, and natural science makes a huge difference in overcoming the limitations of artificially segregated communities of practice. The overall mission is to bring together pioneer work, leveraging previously unused potential by developing the right questions, methods, and tools, as well as dealing with problems of information accuracy and incompleteness.

Funding for the symposium series  has been generously provided throughout the years by the Arts and Technology Program at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), Leonardo/OLATS studiolabproject.eu, the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University (NU), the Center for Complex Network Research at NU, DTU Informatics Technical University of Denmark, and the Leonardo Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. Without the generous support from our sponsors this event would not have been free and open to all participants.

About the Book
Edited by Maximilian Schich, Isabel Meirelles, and Roger Malina, the Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks eBook is a first anthology of articles to foster the emerging convergence of arts, humanities, and complex networks in Leonardo journal. Considering its current exponential growth, the book cannot and does not present an exhaustive account of all relevant aspects of the field. That said we firmly believe that this selection highlights many key questions. The articles cover a kaleidoscope of different approaches, ranging from vigorous humanistic inquiry and pure natural science to free artistic expression. Our goal is to provide a useful overview of a large variety of specializations as well as new and interesting collaborations.

We have loosely organized the selected articles in a number of self-emerging groups, including Networks in Culture, Networks in Art, Networks in the Humanities, Art About Networks, and Research in Network Visualization. The groups overlap and combine a great variety of perspectives. As we approach the common goal to measure, visualize, and understand complex networks in the arts and humanities, we look forward to documenting the further growth of this diversity of approaches in future incarnations of this book. The publication is updated yearly in the beginning of June.

The Leonardo E-Book Managing Editor is Amy Ione. The publication is a project of the ATEC Experimental Publishing and Curating initiative. The publication is part of the Leonardo/OLATS participation in the STUDIOLABS project, which brings together leading European scientific and cultural groups around the topics of complex networks, the future of water and synthetic biology.

E-book:  http://amzn.to/13fHXFf
Podcast: http://www.mitpressjournals.org

About the Companion Site
The e-book is augmented via this web companion site, with the addition of abstracts selected for presentation at the upcoming Arts, Humanities, and Complex Network  5th Satellite Symposium at NetSci2014 on June 3 2014 at NETSCI 2014 at Northwestern University. The site content is edited by Maximilian Schich, Isabel Meirelles, and Roger Malina. The layout and design of the AHCN web companion has been developed under the direction of Arts and Technology professor Cassini Nazir and implemented by Max Mechanic, building upon a modified WordPress theme by Theme Trust.

Web Companion: http://ahcncompanion.info/