Complexhibit 2026

Programme

Day 1 — 30 June

15:30 – 16:00: Registration

16:00 – 16:30: Institutional greetings

16:30 – 17:00: Analysing the Exhibition Domain as a Complex Cultural Ecosystem: Ontology, Knowledge Graph and Query Applications – Nuria Rodríguez Ortega (University of Málaga) and M.ª Luisa Díez Platas (International University of La Rioja, UNIR)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

17:00 – 17:30: Mapping Cultural Complexity in Networks of Writers Over the Last Three Centuries – Gustavo Ariel Schwartz (Centre for Materials Physics, CSIC – UPV/EHU; University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

17:30 – 18:00: Charting Contemporaneity: Pathways through Exhibitions, Museums and Markets- Clarissa Ricci (University of Bologna)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

18:00 – 19:00: Plenary Session | What About Mrs John Doe? People in Provenance Data- Lynn Rother (Leuphana University)
50-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A 

19:00 – 19:30: Wrap-up & end of Day 1

Day 2 — 1 July

9:00 – 9:30: Mapping the 20th-Century Architectural Ecosystem through Journals: a retrospective and prospective reflection on Bidiria – Federico Deambrosis (Politecnico di Milano)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

9:30 – 10:00: Ten Years After MUSA16: Advances and Challenges in Compiling a Corpus for the Study of Translated Museum Texts – Jorge Leiva Rojo (University of Málaga)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

10:00 – 10:30: Hotspots, Bypasses, and Semantic Drift: Mapping CultureKnowledge Through Wikipedia’s Biographical Network – Paschalis Agapitos (Centre for Materials Physics, CSIC – UPV/EHU), Juan Luis Suárez (CulturePlex Lab, Western University), Gustavo Ariel Schwartz (Centre for Materials Physics, CSIC – UPV/EHU)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

10:30 – 11:00: Coffee break

11:00 – 11:30: The German Democratic Republic in Context: Reducing the Complexity of Historical Data through Visualisation – Linda Freyberg (Research Library for the History of Education, DIPF Leibniz Institute)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

11.30 – 12.00: «Dense regions of complexity»: The intrinsic dimension and neural geometry of art-critical knowledge in large language models – Ángel Mª Lumbreras (University of Málaga)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

12:00 – 12:30: Think Tank Session 1 Open discussion on the morning presentations

12:30 – 13:30: DARIAH / CLARIAH session: European Research Infrastructure Consortia and the FAIR Principles – Arturo Montejo-Ráez (University of Jaén)

13:30 – 15:00: Lunch break

15:00 – 15:30: Capturing Ephemeral Complexity: A Linked Open Data Approach to Theatre Productions – Vivien Wolter (Trier Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Trier)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

15:30 – 16:00: From *Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form* to Linked Data: amethodological proposal for describing exhibitions and processescontemporary artworks via the OntoExhibit ontology – Maria Serena Matarrese (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan); Nuria Rodríguez Ortega (University of Málaga)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A A

16:00 – 16:30: Historical Frames. Engaging with historical change and complexityin cultural heritage ecosystems – Sofia Baroncini (Leibniz Institute of European History, IEG)
20-minute talk + 5-minute Q&A

16:30 – 17:00: Constructing the Canon: Museums, Exhibitions and Data Analysis in the Processes of Cultural Legitimisation of Pictorial Abstraction. – Carmen Padrun Romero (University of Málaga)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

17:00 – 17:30: Computational Hermeneutics of Museum Discourse: Modelling Bias and Interpretive Framing in Curatorial Texts – Mahnoush Pourhosseini Akbarie (Sapienza University of Rome)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

17:30 – 18:00: Think Tank Session 2 — Open discussion — afternoon topics

18:00 – 18:15: Coffee break

18:15 – 18:45: Modelling Time, Space and Complexity: Simulating Prehistoric Societies as Event Systems – Juan A. Barceló  (Autonomous University of Barcelona)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

18:45 – 19:15: The Order of Indeterminacy: Complexity, Uncertainty, and the Black Box — The Limits of Modelling – Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi (Aix-Marseille University)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

19:15 – 19:45: Title to be confirmed – Bárbara Romero Ferrón (L(Euphana University)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

19:45 – 20:00: Think Tank Session 3 — Open discussion — themes at the end of the day

Day 3 — 2 July

9:00 – 9:30: Modelling an Intermedial Ecosystem: A Computational Approach to GenderedCanon Formation in 1930s Madrid – Irene Palencia Mora (National University of Distance Education (UNED)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

9:30 – 10:00: Modelling Visual Complexity in Performance Photography: Period, Venue, and Photographic Mediation at the Festival d’Avignon – Giacomo Alliata (University of Rennes 2)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

10:00 – 10:30: Fragile Networks: Latent Comprehension and the Hermeneutics of LLM-Based Citation Extraction in Art History – Andrea Alfarano, Eduardo Trabattoni, Dario Negueruela del Castillo (University of Zurich, UZH)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

10:30 – 11:00: Coffee break

11:00 – 11:30: The Interplay Between Politics and Culture in MultiplatformPublication Practices of a Right-Wing Blog: A Russian Example ofDiscourse on Whiteness and How to Investigate its Complexity – Elena Hamidy (University of Giessen)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

11:30 – 12:00: Regrouping the Avant-Garde: A Multiscalar Network Approach to European Artist Groups (1905–1915) – Teresa Kamencek (CReA Lab; University of Vienna)
20-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A

12:00– 13:00: Plenary session | The Paradox of Culture: The Impossibility of Mankind and the Possibility of Life. A Complexity Theory Approach – Carlos Eduardo Maldonado (University of El Bosque)
50-minute talk + 10-minute Q&A 

13:00 – 13:45: Think Tank Session 4 —  Closing open discussion & summary

13:45 – 14:00: Closing: Interactive Showcase: ‘Radicular’, an immersive experience.

Conference Concept

Complexity is a general property of cultural systems across historical periods. Cultural life has long unfolded through dense interdependencies among institutions and patronage regimes, media and material infrastructures, markets and circuits of exchange, publics and interpretive communities, and the norms and policies that govern cultural legitimacy. Across time-whether in early modern correspondence networks, nineteenth-century print cultures, or today's platform-mediated environments-these interacting forces constitute cultural ecosystems whose dynamics are non-linear, multi-scalar, and historically stratified. They generate emergent phenomena such as canon formation and marginalization, reputational cascades, diffusion and imitation, cycles of attention, unequal circulation, and durable asymmetries of access and preservation.

Over recent decades, the increasing data mediation of cultural activity and the rise of digital infrastructures have made some of these dynamics more visible, more rapid, and in certain domains more measurable-while also introducing new regimes of visibility, new feedback loops, and new forms of inequality. Contemporary technological developments-mass digitization, networked cultural infrastructures, machine-readable standards, and advances in AI and data science-reconfigure cultural ecosystems in ways that increase systemic complexity while simultaneously extending our capacity to render that complexity analytically tractable. They enable the formalization of cultural knowledge, the modeling of systemic dynamics, and the testing of claims against evidence at scales and resolutions that earlier scholarship could only approximate. This shift makes computational approaches methodologically salient not as a replacement for interpretation, but as a means to articulate interpretive arguments with explicit models, traceable assumptions, and empirical accountability.

Against this background, the conference advances a deliberately reflexive research problem:

What does it mean to study culture-rigorously and critically-when we conceptualise cultural ecosystems as complex systems that can be formally represented, computationally modelled, and empirically evaluated?

A second, closely related question follows:

How can we develop computational forms of cultural inquiry that are simultaneously system-sensitive and historically grounded-capable of formal representation, modelling, and evaluation-without collapsing cultural interpretation into mere measurement?

The conference is anchored in the Complexhibit Project, which develops methods for the semantic integration of heterogeneous sources-such as catalogues, curatorial texts, reviews, institutional records, and digital traces-to enable enriched, comparative analysis of the exhibition domain across contexts and scales. Building on this framework, the conference welcomes contributions that extend complexity-informed perspectives to broader cultural ecosystems, including arts and heritage, cultural industries, archives and libraries, education, mediation, platform cultures, communities, and cultural policy.