How Should Agent-Based Modelling Engage With Historical Processes?

Abstract

This paper consists of two main parts. After an introduction, the first part briefly considers the way that historical processes have been represented in ABM to date. This makes it possible to draw more general conclusions about the limitations of ABM in dealing with distinctively historical (as opposed to merely dynamic) processes. The second part of the paper presents a very simple ABM in which three such distinctively historical processes are analysed. These are the possible significance of unique individuals -so called Great Men, the invention and spread of social innovations from specific points in time and the creation of persistent social structures (also from specific points in time). The object of the paper is to advance the potential applicability of ABM to historical events as understood by historians (rather than anthropologists or practitioners of ABM.

Towards a Reconciliation Between Simulational, Ludic, and Historiographical Practices in Research

“…Although they offer suggestions to get around the issue, the authors admit that “ABM appears to have blind spots about what makes history distinctive”. (Chattoe-Brown & Gabbriellini, 2017, p. 57) Chattoe-Brown and Gabriellini’s remark echoes an early prediction by Claudio Fogu, who felt that the advent of digital histories was moving historical imagination “towards a spatialization of historical experience, away from the temporal axis of narrative forms of historical consciousness”. (Fogu, 2009, p. 115) In his assessment, this process “detach[ed] the notion of history from its double reference to the past and to the real”.…”

“…Other authors have advanced a more worrisome concern: that simulations and history are fundamentally incompatible. Writing specifically about agent-based modeling (ABM), a genre of computer modeling focused on the interactions of autonomous agents with their environment, Edmund Chattoe-Brown and Simone Gabriellini observed that existing historical simulations often operate on “anthropological conception of history in which agents behave according to fixed social rules that are simply played out over time.”(Chattoe-Brown & Gabbriellini, 2017, p. 55) This runs counter historians’ understanding of history as a field in which change itself is the object of inquiry. Although they offer suggestions to get around the issue, the authors admit that “ABM appears to have blind spots about what makes history distinctive”.…”