Euromachs in "Creativity & Innovation – Best Practice from EU Programmes"

Published by the European Commission, February 2009, pp. 26-27

The European Commission published a brochure featuring 35 projects that represent best practices in Creativity and Innovation. The Euromachs Mater Programme on European Heritage, Digital Media and the Information Society is one of the two Erasmus programmed that were selected, and appears in pages 26-27.

"The projects featured in this short catalogue show examples of best practice in promoting creativity and innovation. They were selected by a panel of independent experts drawn from the various programmes of the European Commission. I hope that they will help to inspire the reader along the lines of the motto of the Year: “Imagine. Create. Innovate.”"

Ján Figel’
European Commissioner 
for Education, Training, Culture and Youth

Interpersonal networks and the archaeology of social structures; using social positioning events to understand social strategies and individual behaviour, Revista de História da Sociedade e da Cultura 7, 2007, pp. 175-193

Co-authored with Rosário Campos.

This paper is based on two community reconstitution studies (Soure and Lousã) in early modern Portugal (17-18th centuries), that demonstrate the value of analyzing networks of relations, specially the "apadrinhamento", for understanding social structures and the individual strategies that they encompass.

A central aspect of the methodology used is the concept of "event of relative social positioning": an action, traceable in the sources, by which an actor makes explicit his perception of the social position that he has relatively to another actor. The relationship of "apadrinhamento", in which someone asks another person to be the godfather or godmother of a child, is the main source of social positioning events used in our research. It will be demonstrated that people never invite as godfather or godmother someone they consider socially inferior.

This simple principle produces surprising results when a global reconstitution is made at the community level and the relative social position of a large number of frequently interacting individuals is obtained. The resulting network has interesting formal characteristics suggesting self - organization e high connectivity, and constitutes and example of what modern network theory calls "small worlds".

The reconstituted web of relations allows us to put into context information from different sources, providing surprising  insights on social mechanism otherwise invisible. Specific case studies will be shown to illustrate the explanatory power of this approach, with a focus on socially determined patterns of moral behavior (Soure), and the impact of an early manufacture in a traditional community (Lousã).

My Book: Allegro Ma Non Troppo [a review of Carlo Cipolla's Allegro ma non troppo, Mulino 1988], in CISUC newsletter, Issue 5, Jan-Mar 2007.

"Historical Geographical Databases: moving forward towards complexity” in Renata De Lorenzo (ed), Storia e Misura. Indicatori Sociali ed Economici nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia (Secoli XVIII-XXX), Franco Angeli, Milano, 2007, pp.183-197.

Micro-Historical Perspectives on Moral Choices: Case Studies from Early Modern Portugal, e-JPH, Vol. 2 number 2, Winter 2004

Moral choice is often discussed in the context of conforming to religious norms, with immoral behavior explained as a consequence of imperfect indoctrination or a lack of control and dissuasion mechanisms by the church and other institutions that promote moral concepts. Our findings point in a different direction: moral choice in sexual matters seems to be the result of an equation that relates the perception of the alternative paths of action, the place of the individual in networks of relations and resources and various trade-offs. It is a question of strategy, at a personal or small group level, and less a question of belief. We use intensive cross-linking of sources to reconstruct individual biographies and networks of relations to gain a micro-historical view on a set of case studies involving public sinners in a Portuguese parish in the 17th and 18th centuries. By placing individual cases in the context of individual life cycles and in the context of family and social relations, we gain relevant insights into motivations for immoral behavior and its role in personal strategies.