Evolution and transformation of early modern cosmological knowledge: a network study

Abstract

We investigated the evolution and transformation of scientific knowledge in the early modern period, analyzing more than 350 different editions of textbooks used for teaching astronomy in European universities from the late fifteenth century to mid-seventeenth century. These historical sources constitute the Sphaera Corpus. By examining different semantic relations among individual parts of each edition on record, we built a multiplex network consisting of six layers, as well as the aggregated network built from the superposition of all the layers. The network analysis reveals the emergence of five different communities. The contribution of each layer in shaping the communities and the properties of each community are studied. The most influential books in the corpus are found by calculating the average age of all the out-going and in-coming links for each book. A small group of editions is identified as a transmitter of knowledge as they bridge past knowledge to the future through a long temporal interval. Our analysis, moreover, identifies the most impactful editions. These books introduce new knowledge that is then adopted by almost all the books published afterwards until the end of the whole period of study. The historical research on the content of the identified books, as an empirical test, finally corroborates the results of all our analyses.

CorDeep and the Sacrobosco Dataset: Detection of Visual Elements in Historical Documents

“…The importance of visual elements in the Sphaera Corpus stems from the nature of the corpus’s editions, which have already been analyzed from very different perspectives [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 ]. The 359 Sphaera editions, centered on the Tractatus de sphaera by Johannes de Sacrobosco (–1256)and printed between 1472 and 1650, were primarily used to teach geocentric astronomy to university students across Europe, generally between fourteen and eighteen years old [ 27 ].…”

Information and Knowledge Organisation in Digital Humanities

“…The Sphere project revolves around the history of a single text: the Tractatus de Sphaera written by Johannes de Sacrobosco (Valleriani 2017(Valleriani , 2020). Sacrobosco's Tractatus is a short treatise on geocentric cosmology written during the 13th century, which gave rise to a very successful commentary tradition.…”

The evolution of scientific literature as metastable knowledge states

“…Other language-based approaches include tracking usage of keywords 20 , analyzing linguistic context 16 , and modeling topics sequentially 17 . Studies using network-based methods usually use citation networks and community detection algorithms such as topological clustering methods 21 or clique percolation methods 22 to identify emergence of new fields, while other network approaches include usage of temporal 23 , multiplex 24 networks, projections of citation networks such as co-authorship 25,26 . Hybrid usage of both language-and network-based methods to predict the evolution of scientific fields includes keyword-generated networks used to predict changes in topics 27 or approaches that mostly rely on network analysis, applying linguistic techniques such as LDA for explanatory labels only 28 .…”