In the first phase of the project, I collected data to reconstruct the social networks of Descartes and his contemporaries. This included searching, collecting, and reading more than three hundreds 17th-century letters, as well as gathering information about their sender, recipient, origin, destination, and date. These latter data have been made available online through Zenodo for researchers across the global to reuse them. (As of 21 April 2022, the data set has been viewed 93 times and downloaded 79 times.) Based on the data, I went on to analyse the factors that drove the diffusion of Descartes's ideas. The findings of this analysis are now presented in the article "The Networked Origins of Cartesian Philosophy and Science,” which has just been accepted for publication in HOPOS, the journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science.
In addition, I followed online courses and workshops to deepen my knowledge of network science, including a two-day virtual event organised by network scientist Demival Vasques Filho. In this way, I learned how to use software applications such as Gephi and how to write scripts with programming languages R and Python.
I presented the results of my research at various international conferences, including those organised by the Historical Network Research Community (HNR), the Dutch School Research School of Philosophy (OZSW), and the Italian Society for the History of Science (SISS). In April 2022, I took part in an expert meeting hosted by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin to discuss ways to build a common platform for historical network research. In the context of my dissemination activities, I organised two online events with dozens of speakers from different countries and institutions. The seminar "Networks of Philosophy, Philosophy of Networks" shed light on the interactions between philosophy and network science. The workshop "Framing Innovation in a Networked World" fostered a discussion across disciplines about how social networks have changed the way of making and spreading innovation. Furthermore, I was invited to give talks by the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics (EIRE) and the American University of Central Asia (AUCA), and gave a course for the students of the Erasmus School of Philosophy (ESPhil) on "Networks of Philosophy."
Work in progress includes two articles, one on the concept of network growth in the history of science, and one on networks as interpretative frameworks. Besides, I plan to publish the Python and R scripts I have developed for these articles as well as the underlying data so that scholars can replicate my research or build on it to reach new outcomes.
