tracing knowledge transfer

News of an interesting project tracing and mapping how knowledge ws transferred around the Mediterranean in early classical times.

Interesting in its own right for telling us about early trade routes and island hopping - eg the spread of the greek culture an colonies to southern Italy and even as far as Marseilles, and by contact with the celtic peoples living there, up the Rhone valley.

As I say intrinsically interesting as it would allow us to trace ancient knowledge networks and by using GIS techniques tie them into the landscape etc.

I was always struck, while staying at the Crawfordjohn campsite in Scotland, the Roman road, the old road, the drove road, the nineteenth century trainline and the modern freeway all followed essentially the same line as that was what the geopgraphy of the landscape required.

Anyway back to the project. There's an interesting rider to this. They also plan to use the same mapping techniques to the spread of information technology and concepts, and modelling how ideas ripple through - a Kevin Bacon experiment for knowledge transfer and mapping global cyber-social networks.