Welcome back everybody to Beyond the Patterns.

So today I have the great pleasure to announce a friend and colleague from the University

of Antwerp.

Mike Kestermund is a research associate professor at the Department of Literature at the University

of Antwerp.

He specializes in computational text analysis for the computational humanities.

His work has a strong focus on historic literature and his previous research has covered a wide

range of topics in literary history including classical medieval, early modern and modernist

texts.

Together with Folger Carstorp and Alan Riddle, he has just published a textbook on data science

for the humanities with Princeton University Press.

Mike recently took up interest in ecology and how its quantitative methods can be meaningful

and be applied to the study of culture.

Mike also lives in Brussels and if you don't know it, he is also the author of two novels

in Dutch.

So if you have time, I definitely recommend to read them.

So today it's a great pleasure to have him here as our invited speaker and his presentation

is entitled Ecology and Cultural Heritage Modeling the Historic Survival of Books and

Authors with Unseen Species Models.

Mike, great pleasure to have you here and the stage is yours.

Thank you so much for that kind introduction.

It's a pleasure as always to see you again and thanks for the opportunity to present

this talk which I hope to be able to demonstrate how we can apply methods from ecology in the

study of maybe surprisingly cultural heritage.

And the case study that I will focus on today is historic literature specifically and even

more specifically in fact the historic literature that did not survive which might be a bit

weird but from a broader perspective what I hope to challenge today is this big divide

that still exists between on the one hand biology and its study and on the other hand

culture and its study and I believe that precisely the use of digital and computational methods

in fact allows us to bridge that gap.

Today I'm going to report on work that is joint work, collaborative work with a large

number of people that I will show you downstream in the talk but especially with my co-author

Folger Kaxdorf who is a senior researcher at an institute in Amsterdam and I've been

working with him on these problems for a while now.

We've also presented our work a couple of times already each time we make a little progress

in the code, in the data etc but I'm very happy to share with you today where we stand.

First I wanted to say a few things on this curious mix maybe of literature, historic

literature and ecology.

So I guess that some of you have an idea already of the kind of things that are being studied

in ecology but just to set the stage I include a definition here of what people do in ecology

from a statistical textbook by Kierke Schrouw that I read a while back and it goes like

this says ecology is concerned with the number or abundance and as they call it in ecology

of living things.

So how many individuals are there, how did their number evolve over time, where were

they, where do they go to and important questions concern the interaction of these living things

with on the one hand abiotic stuff and on the other hand biotic aspects of the environment

so other animals for instance.

What people like to study there is the interaction between these individuals but also the mechanism

that drive their numbers that explain their numbers and their evolution, their dynamics

so to speak.