Complexity in the Humanities workshop

Complexity in the Humanities is a CModS research strand for 2014-15, and this inaugural workshop seeks to stimulate discussion by drawing upon the ongoing work of the NarCS group, an interdisciplinary network co-hosted by the York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies. The NarCS group brings together specialists in complex systems and in narrative from across the sciences and humanities in a dialogue exploring the problematic relation between these two fields (for more information, see Narrative and complex systems). The presentations at this workshop are based upon draft essays to be collected in a forthcoming volume, Narrating Complexity; they aim to speak across disciplinary borders, and we aim to build in dialogue and feedback as an integral part of the book's structure.

This workshop will enact a cycle of that feedback loop, providing for questions and responses, in both directions, within its dialogue between the humanities and complex systems science. Provisional titles for day one are:

• Merja Polvinen: A Simple Story of a Complex Mind? A Rhetorical Analysis of Cognitive Science Texts
• Marco Bernini: On Fictional Cognitive Modelling: Beckett Exploring Mind’s Complexity
• James Bown: Switches, feedbacks and integrators - how networks network
• Federico Pianzola: Looking at narrative as a complex system: the Proteus Principle
• Alan Winfield:When Robots Tell each other Stories: The Emergence of Artificial Fiction
• Marthe-Sophie Zeevenhooven: Plato with a movie camera: visually thinking of complexity
• Leo Caves, Susan Stepney: Gardening Complex Systems, and other metaphors
• Richard Walsh: Sense and Wonder: Complexity and the Limits of Narrative Understanding

Day two will be structured around formal and informal responses to, elaborations upon and digressions from the topics raised on day one, in absentia perspectives from other NarCS group members, and interventions from new participants.