Complexity and the Human Experience

Questions of values, ontologies, ethics, aesthetics, discourse, origins, language, literature, and meaning do not lend themselves readily, or traditionally, to equations, probabilities, and models. However, with the increased adoption of natural science tools in economics, anthropology, and political science―to name only a few social scientific fields highlighted in this volume―quantitative methods in the humanities are becoming more common.

The theory of complexity holds significant promise for better understanding social and human phenomena based on interactions among the participating "agents," whatever they may be: a thought, a person, a conversation, a sentence, or an email. Such systems can exhibit phase transitions, feedback loops, self-organization, and emergent properties. These dynamic systems lend themselves naturally to the kind of analysis made possible by models and simulations developed with complex science tools. This volume offers a tour of quantitative analyses, models, and simulations of humanities and social science phenomena that have been historically the purview of qualitative methods.

Paul A. Youngman is associate professor of German studies at Washington and Lee University, USA, and a faculty associate at the Complex Systems Institute, University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte), USA. He is author of Black Devil and Iron Angel, an analysis of the aesthetic reception of the railway in nineteenth-century Germany, and We Are the Machine, a study of computers, the Internet, and information in contemporary Germany. Prof. Youngman has also authored numerous articles on technology and culture.

Mirsad Hadzikadic has over 30 years of information technology experience combining business and academic environments. He currently serves as the founding director of the Complex Systems Institute at UNC Charlotte. Dr. Hadzikadic’s research interests include data mining, health informatics, complexity theory, brain informatics, and a systems view of policies in financial services, economics, defense, healthcare, and political science.