Connecting Humanities
One of the blessings of being a digital humanist is being able to study something as inherently interesting as music. A while ago, I had fun trying to figure out which band was the most important in the Italian music scene. That was cool, but it left open a question, which I want to address Continue reading "Comparing the Italian and Danish Music Industries"
When something unpleasant is happening around you, the most natural reaction you might have is to try and get away from it. For instance, if you live in Mexico and there is a lot of criminal activity in the neighborhood, you might want to move, if you can afford to. This seems intuitive, but is Continue reading "Criminal Activities and Migration"
Each day some trillion dollars change hands in any sort of financial transaction. Hidden in this money ocean there are also fraudulent actors, which attempt to sanitize illicit money by making its provenance appear normal. No one can manually verify all transactions, so there are a number of machine learning algorithms trying to spot the Continue reading "A Better Way to Evaluate Money Laundering…
Part of the Italian lore infused on me when growing up is to be disillusioned when it comes to interactions with politicians. Assuming that what a politician promises carries information about what they re going to do is not the wisest way of living one s life. This is a gut feeling and it could be completely Continue reading "Is What Politicians Do Similar to What they Say?"
A couple of years ago, I worked with Marilena Hohmann and Karel Devriendt on a method to estimate ideological polarization on social media: the tendency of people to have more extreme opinions and to avoid contact with people holding a different opinion. Studying ideological polarization is interesting, but it misses a crucial piece of the Continue reading "Quantifying Affective Polarization on…
The past fascinates us. I often fantasize about how our ancestors lived: what did they do? How did they relate to one another? Were their social networks similar to ours? Archaeology is the way we try to answer these questions if we do not have written records. The main problem is that archaeology finds stuff Continue reading "Finding a Connection between Kinship and Material Culture using Network…
After a year of dedicated effort, I m glad to announce that the second version of my atlas for network science is finally out! Just like version one, the PDF is available free of charge both on arXiV and on the companion website, which also contains all the solutions to the exercises. If you re a fan Continue reading "The Atlas for the Aspiring Network Scientist v2"
Over the course of the last few months, I had the pleasure to find new teammates for several research projects I am involved in. I wanted to take a moment to thank them for being part of my research life and they have the kindness of calling me their supervisor or principal investigator. Here Continue reading "My Teammates"
Last year I was talking with a non-Italian, trying to convey to them how nearly the entirety of contemporary Italian music rests on the shoulders of Gianni Maroccolo and the parts that don t, should. In an attempt to find a way out of that conversation, they casually asked wouldn t it be cool to map Continue reading "Italian Music through the Lens of Complex Networks"
I think Wikipedia is great. I spend tons of time on it. I especially like to read about history, because it allows me to quickly jump into obscure details about anything, without the need to scout for specialized literature that might be super hard to find. But one question always creeps in the back of Continue reading "The Glass Door of Wikipedia s Notable People"