ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

ACADEMIA proposes a pioneering study of a neglected corpus of manuscripts stemming from the practice of quodlibetal debates held at Faculties of Arts of European universities, flourishing from the 14th to the early 16th century. As prescribed by the university statutes, dozens of professors participated periodically in these unique collective works of the Middle Ages, which encompassed all the disciplines pursued at the university, from logic to medicine to theology. The PI hypothesises that the professors presented at the hitherto mostly ignored quodlibets their recent scientific innovations, which they then published in the first collective volumes of European academia. The PI thus proposes a novel theoretical framework for understanding the quodlibets: they stand at the origin of the modern concept of science as a collective intellectual enterprise, similar to modern conferences and the subsequent dissemination of results. This makes them and their written form critical for understanding European intellectual and scientific traditions, both past and present. ACADEMIA’s ambition is to establish the corpus of these debates as a new field of study through an extensive examination of manuscripts, thus filling a substantial gap, radically extending the fields of the history of universities and intellectual history, and reconstructing the roots of the modern practice of fostering collective science. A complex analysis of the corpus will bring about a substantial change in our understanding of medieval practices of the production and sharing of knowledge. Aiming to examine the quodlibets as a phenomenon successively interconnecting European intellectual space, ACADEMIA focuses on fourteen universities at which the PI has identified the tradition so far and on their mutual relations and development. ACADEMIA employs an interdisciplinary team and an innovative combination of approaches from history, codicology, palaeography, philology, hermeneutics and Digital Humanities.

1 260 485 €

Start date: 2021-07-01, End date: 2026-06-30

COSMOLOCALISM will document, analyse, test, evaluate, and create awareness about an emerging mode of production, based on the confluence of the digital commons (e.g. open knowledge and design) with local manufacturing and automation technologies (from 3D printing and CNC machines to low-tech tools and crafts). This convergence could catalyse the transition to new inclusive and circular productive models, such as the “design global, manufacture local” (DGML) model. DGML describes the processes through which design is developed as a global digital commons, whereas the manufacturing takes place locally, through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in mind. DGML seems to form economies of scope that promote sustainability and open innovation while celebrating new ways of cooperation. However, such claims rest on thin conceptual and empirical foundations. COSMOLOCALISM is a multiphase, pilot-driven investigation of the DGML phenomenon that seeks to understand relevant organisational models, their evolution, and their broader political economy/ecology and policy implications. Through the lens of diverse case studies and participatory action research, the conditions under which the DGML model thrives will be explored. COSMOLOCALISM has three concurrent streams: practices; innovation; and sustainability. First, DGML practices will be studied, patterns will be recognised and their form, function, cultural values, and governance structure will be determined. Second, the relevant open innovation ecosystems and their potential to reorient design and manufacturing practices will be examined. Third, selected DGML products will be evaluated from an environmental sustainability perspective, involving both qualitative and quantitative methods. The interdisciplinary nature of COSMOLOCALISM will explore new horizons to substantively improve our understanding of how we could do “more” and “better” with less.

1 017 275 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31

The DISSINET project will provide an unprecedented, “networked” understanding of dissident religious and inquisitorial cultures in medieval Europe through a vast computational analysis of the social, spatial, and textual relationships by which they were formed and recorded. Rather than treating these cultures through narrative case-study or traditional social-historical analysis, our approach will build upwards from the microscopic details of human interactivity towards a broader social picture. Historiographical impressions of the social grounding and spread of religious dissidence, the specifics of dissident cultures as well as their shared characteristics, and the confrontation between inquisitors and suspects will thus be challenged from a previously inaccessible perspective. To achieve this goal, we will manually collect data on every aspect of dissident and inquisitorial interactivity from inquisition records that cover thousands of individuals from the 13th to the 16th centuries. The resulting database will be large-scale and yet retain every nuance of our sources. Our data model will allow us to employ cutting-edge computational techniques, well-adapted to uncover hitherto undetected and historically significant patterns: these methods will include social network analysis, geographic information science, and computational text analysis. In its broader implications, the project will open up a significant new dimension in the conversation between history and the social sciences. It will offer the former a novel approach to challenging historical material, and the latter pre-modern perspectives on the bottom-up emergence of larger social phenomena such as covert networks, repression, and shared religious culture. Finally, DISSINET will make a significant contribution to the digital humanities, providing a powerful digital toolkit for research into multifaceted human phenomena that retains and makes use of the complexities of textual sources.

1 991 868 €

Start date: 2021-07-01, End date: 2026-06-30

This proposal outlines agenda which aims to improve our understanding of policies in environments with cognitively limited agents. It seeks to extend and apply the theory of rational inattention developed in macroeconomics. Citizens are inattentive to details of tax codes, government bureaucrats cannot inspect all data about people in need, and voters are highly uninformed about politicians’ campaign platforms. The agenda is specifically targeted at applications where human inability to digest all available information has strong implications for public policy formation. It falls into three broad parts. First (macroeconomics), the proposed research will develop a new model of risk-sharing in a typical modern-macro setting with heterogeneous agents. Instead of incentive constraints, the imperfections will be driven by the government’s or citizens’ inability to process all available information. What are the properties of the resulting system of redistribution? Why do taxes often take a simple form? Can minorities be left behind because they attract less of the government’s attention? Second (behavioral economics), it will extend the rational inattention theory to model how agents simplify multidimensional features of the environment. Among many applications, the theory is likely to provide an alternative explanation for mental accounting, when people have separate budgets for different types of expenditures (critical to consumption decisions, especially of the poor), and for salience of different elements of the tax code. Third (political economy), it will develop a unified framework to study implications of voters’ rational inattention (selective ignorance) for the outcomes of political processes, such as for popular demand for misguided policies, public good provision, and the complexity of announced platforms. Voters’ information acquisition and fragmented information processing will be studied in a field experiment.

950 424 €

Start date: 2016-04-01, End date: 2021-03-31