First this week, we'll hear from Yazeed Awwad, who will be discussing Boolean network models of cultural evolution. Yazeed is currently a grad student at the MIT Media Lab, where he's focusing on data sciences and visualization.

Historical and cultural trends often exhibit familiar and predictable patterns, yet their study and analysis has remained large a province of the arts, with only sporadic input from the scientific community. What if all concepts were understood as having structure and function, and the ability to coalesce into greater structures with their own well-understood functions and behavior—not unlike molecules and life-forms? Using Wikipedia articles in all languages to represent concepts, and defining their content by the links they have to other Wikipedia articles, the architecture of ideas is explored using a Boolean square matrix indicating the network of references between concepts. A model is presented for identifying cultural systems and classifying them as either ordered or disordered, with the latter further divisible into complex versus chaotic.

In the second half of lab meeting, Cammie will give an introductory tutorial on how to use GitHub desktop for version control of scripts and text files. If you are interested in learning how to use GitHub and would like to follow along in this hands-on tutorial, please do the following:

3. Download the attached zipped folder ("github tutorial files.zip"), which contains files that we'll use in the tutorial.