The brown bag lunch is titled: Modelling the process of knowledge accumulation in the early modern period by Dr. Maryam Zamani, postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and previously at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems.

From Dr. Zamani: I will talk about modelling the spread of scientific knowledge among the textbooks of the Sphaera corpus which consists of more than 350 editions that were used for teaching astronomy in all the European universities during the early modern period. Sphaera Corpus is built by examining different semantic relations among individual parts of each edition on record in a form of a multiplex network consisting of six layers. The aim of the modelling is a better understanding, and possibly predicting the process of knowledge accumulation among the editions. I considered the semantic text parts as the units which were transferred among the editions and will explain how their spreading process can be modelled in the form of SI model and its modified version, the Bass model. Furthermore, the modelling helped us to unravel the path of knowledge transformation and the mechanism of its growth in the early modern period.