Modelling climate and societal resilience in the Eastern Mediterranean in the last Millennium

This article analyses high-quality hydroclimate proxy records and spatial reconstructions from the Central and Eastern Mediterranean and compares them with two Earth System Model simulations (CCSM4, MPI-ESM-P) for the Crusader period in the Levant (1095–1290 CE), the Mamluk regime in Transjordan (1260–1516 CE) and the Ottoman crisis and Celâlî Rebellion(1580–1610 CE). During the three time intervals, environmental and climatic stress tested the resilience of complex societies.We find that the multidecadal precipitation and drought variations in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean cannot be explained by external forcings (solar variations, tropical volcanism); rather they were driven by internal climate dynamics. Our research emphasises the challenges, opportunities and limitations of linking proxy records, palaeoreconstructions and model simulations to better understand how climate can affect human history

Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization

Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured, and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? These are long-standing questions that have proven difficult to answer. To test between competing hypotheses, we constructed a massive repository of historical and archaeological information known as "Seshat: Global History Databank." We systematically coded data on 414 societies from 30 regions around the world spanning the last 10,000 years. We were able to capture information on 51 variables reflecting nine characteristics of human societies, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems. Our analyses revealed that these different characteristics show strong relationships with each other and that a single principal component captures around three-quarters of the observed variation. Furthermore, we found that different characteristics of social complexity are highly predictable across different world regions. These results suggest that key aspects of social organization are functionally related and do indeed coevolve in predictable ways. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history

Named entity recognition applied on a data base of Medieval Latin charters. The case of chartae burgundiae

Abstract The work on the named entity recognition (NER) in databases of historical texts has been placed among the most promising new ways to implement best recovery and managements tools for exploring mass data. In this paper, we describe the application processing NER through a modelling with CRF on an annotated database of Burgundy collection of charters from the tenth to thirteenth centuries. The aim is to generate a model for automatic recognition of named entities in historical sources. We discuss the nature of historical documents in the corpus and extraction of rules, and we expose adaptation to the processing algorithm and the most common problems encountered in Medio Latin texts using diplomatic formularies, which is an atypical case within the NER studies

Complex systems:Physics beyond physics

Complex systems are characterized by specific time-dependent interactions among their many constituents. As a consequence they often manifest rich, non-trivial and unexpected behavior. Examples arise both in the physical and non-physical world. The study of complex systems forms a new interdisciplinary research area that cuts across physics, biology, ecology, economics, sociology, and the humanities. In this paper we review the essence of complex systems from a physicist's point of view, and try to clarify what makes them conceptually different from systems that are traditionally studied in physics. Our goal is to demonstrate how the dynamics of such systems may be conceptualized in quantitative and predictive terms by extending notions from statistical physics and how they can often be captured in a framework of co-evolving multiplex network structures. We mention three areas of complex-systems science that are currently studied extensively, the science of cities, dynamics of societies, and the representation of texts as evolutionary objects. We discuss why these areas form complex systems in the above sense. We argue that there exists plenty of new land for physicists to explore and that methodical and conceptual progress is needed most.Comment: 22 pages, no figure