Page 46 - TLU magazine - The Way to The Top

VITALLY IMPORTANT
BIGDATA
The purpose of project CUDAN is to create a new approach to the analysis of culturaldata.
The background of CUDAN professor Maxi- milian Schich is colourful: a young man from Munich with a background in classical art his- tory, archaeology and psychology, started work- ing with a memory and research data company at a fatefully important time (1990) where, in his words, he became a data pathologist.
The structures of big data, which often seemed unexpected, be- came the research objects of
his Master’s thesis. During
his doctoral studies in
art history, Maximillian
delved into the topics
of complexity theory.
The topic gained real
momentum when
Maximillian met László
Barabásiga, whose
research centre he started
working in. There, as in
the future CUDAN Open
Labs, every person worked with
their own focus. However, research-
ers with different backgrounds belonged to one team based on methodology or data.
Something extraordinary
“It is really exiting to come to Estonia with the re- search as it has a long tradition of cultural semiot- ics,” admits professor Schich. “This is how we can work towards more qualitative cultural semiotics and more quantitative complexity theory integra- tion in order to understand their common parts, opportunities and need for one another.”
Schich recognises that cross-cutting research of this kind always involves a great risk, but also
a great reward since it is difficult to prove to a specialist in one field while applying for funding and not knowing much about the other field.
Therefore, Tallinn University is doing some- thing extraordinary and rare with the estab- lishment of the CUDAN project – we have the opportunity to use the complexity theory to study culture. In addition, CUDAN is funda- mentally connected to the BFM i.e. the arts. Schich sees this as an excellent opportunity to
formalise part of the research results, in addition to classical science
articles, into content that can be visualised and which in- advertently can be turned
into art.
New fields of meaning
One of the principles of CUDAN is to bring together experts of dif- ferent fields to exchange
ideas and learn from one another on both a local and
global level. Problems or topics known to researchers can also occur
in other fields under different names and highlight new and interesting fields of meaning.
“Discussions should be continued, which would make it possible to move between fields,” Schich is convinced. “We can explore historical examples and compare data of modern phe- nomena to find similarities.”
Schich describes how cultural issues have a wide reach and uses the topic of climate change as an example. “Climate change is not only a topic related to climate, but is also a cultural problem,” he says.
46
TALLINN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE / NO. 14 / SPRING 2020
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