Stephanie Grohmann

TL;DR: A database of historical and archaeological information from 30 regions around the world over the last 10,000 years revealed that characteristics, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems, show strong evolutionary relationships with each other and that complexity of a society across different world regions can be meaningfully measured using a single principal component of variation.

TL;DR: The Seshat: Global History Databank (Seshat) as discussed by the authors is a large-scale dataset of historical and archaeological data from the period from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution.

TL;DR: This ontology re-engineering exercise identified several pitfalls in modelling social science codebooks with semantic web technologies; provided insights into the practical application of OWL to complex, real-world modelling challenges; and has enabled the construction of new, RDF-based tools to support the large-scale Seshat data curation effort.

TL;DR: The suggestion that polity population divided by polity area should be one of the social complexity dimensions raises a number of issues, including what does this ratio mean at large spatial scales?

TL;DR: The authors argue that moral grandstanding is not mere aberrations within moral discourse, but a necessary consequence of the neoliberal imperative to turn all aspects of the self into market assets, and argue that critical realists should reject moral grandstandings not only for their detrimental effects on public discourse but also because in subordinating morality to the market, it is fundamentally anti-ethical.