DIGIHUMi ettekanne: Kaarel Sikk

• 19 May: Kaarel Sikk (University of Tartu)

"Stories and systems. Exploring settlement patterns as complex systems"

Jakobi 2–103 and Zoom

Abstract
This talk explores the intersection of humanities and complexity science, discussing the intertwined relationships between stories and complex systems. The presentation introduces the concept of complexity and the role of modelling in digital humanities, addressing the historical connections between hard sciences and the pursuit of universal regularities. It examines the experimentation with expanding scale in humanistic stories and their attempts to incorporate models, explaining why these efforts have often been unsuccessful. The talk highlights how a systemic approach changes the scale of analysis and narrative construction.

Largely based on a PhD study of settlement system emergence, which aimed to bridge individual, micro-level decision-making domains with the macro-level emergence of settlement systems. A conceptual model of settlement system formation is outlined and used to explore environments influenced by residential choice through agent-based modelling, which combines the benefits of formal modelling and agent perspective views. By introducing individual agents with varying environmental, social, and random preferences, the general state of emerging settlement patterns is measured. Examples demonstrate that interactions between different levels of analysis lead to counterintuitive results that are difficult to predict. Despite the complexity of individual decision-making, emerging social phenomena can be qualitatively simpler and can be effectively predicted by empirical models. Some potential benefits of a systemic approach in analysing humanities and complex systems are brought out, emphasising the importance of considering different scales and possibly new kinds of narrative constructions in understanding historical and social phenomena.

Biography
Kaarel Sikk is a multidisciplinary researcher at the University of Tartu's Department of Archaeology, working on archaeological data science within the PaleoMIX and EsTerra projects, and spatiality of medieval inquisition networks in the DISSINET project at Masaryk University in Brno. Combining archaeological and historical material with environmental data and quantitative frameworks, his interests encompass formal modelling of long-term processes, complex systems, human-environment interactions, quantitative geography, settlement systems, and the epistemology of digital humanities and archaeological data science. Kaarel completed his doctoral research at the University of Luxembourg, focusing on the theoretical modelling of settlement systems as complex adaptive systems.