TY - JOUR

T1 - Evolution and transformation of early modern cosmological knowledge

T2 - a network study

AU - Zamani, Maryam

AU - Tejedor, Alejandro

AU - Vogl, Malte

AU - Kräutli, Florian

AU - Valleriani, Matteo

AU - Kantz, Holger

N1 - This work was partly supported by the German Ministry for Education and Research as BIFOLD – Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (ref. 01IS18037A) and by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

PY - 2020/12

Y1 - 2020/12

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - Philosophy

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85095947075&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1038/s41598-020-76916-3

DO - 10.1038/s41598-020-76916-3

M3 - Journal articles

C2 - 33188234

AN - SCOPUS:85095947075

VL - 10

JO - Scientific Reports

JF - Scientific Reports

SN - 2045-2322

IS - 1

M1 - 19822

ER -