Description
“I didn’t choose to study archaeology to spend my time in front of a computer” is how one of my students expressed their dismay at the idea that studying humanities (in Europe) or social science (in the USA) may involve the kind of work they avoided their whole life. Yet the academic reality is such that exchanging opinions, developing narratives or simply describing things fails to impress the funders, multiply one’s citation indices or inform policy makers. The “old” ways of doing humanities translates very poorly into what is nowadays the academic “currency”. At the same time we’re witnessing a slow yet steady shift towards formal, computational methods across humanities disciplines. Initially these were mostly related to data, its handling, analysis and visualisation but now a new kid on the block is proclaiming a new dawn for theory building. This kid is simulation modelling and its most prevalent form is Agent-based Modelling (ABM). In simple terms, simulation is a formal representation of our ideas of how the world functions that allows us to see how likely these ideas are given the data. Agent-based modelling is just one of many simulation techniques but it lends itself particularly well to human-centered research. An ABM model operates with familiar entities - individuals, families, houses or cars - which follow easy to understand behaviour rules: “when hungry, find some food”, “copy the idea from a friend”, “exchange only if price is below your budget”. As such, ABM is likely to remain the simulation technique of choice in social and humanities research. In this talk, I will ground modelling methods in the epistemological framework of the scientific process and showcase the innovative ways in which we can use simulation and other formal model-building techniques to understand the interactions between individuals and their social and natural environments. I will talk about the potential and limitations of computational modelling in disciplines studying the past and highlight the range of possible applications. Finally, I will try to sketch out how profound this transition to formal theory development is for our field as a whole.