Prof. Dr. Matteo Valleriani’s research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Histroy of Science (MPIWG) will expand by one research fellow: Olga Nicolaeva. In the frame of BIFOLD, they will create a predictive Machine Learning model, which is able to establish a causal connection between distribution of ‘knowledge atoms’ (illustrations, tables, text parts) in the corpus of early modern textbooks on geocentric cosmology that they are analyzing and the formation of “dominant thought” in the processes of knowledge evolution. They will look into various networks of knowledge atoms, based on their similarity, and apply methods of Graph Deep Learning to identify historical, socio-economic and institutional factors that can explain the emergence of dominant clusters of knowledge atoms and their “popularity” in the processes of knowledge transformation.