Have you ever wondered why the letters we use in writing have the shape they do? Or why sitters are presented in the way they are in most portraits and does this change over time? Or even more generally, why do most of the things around us that are produced by humans look the way they do?

In this talk, Santa Fe Institute postdoctoral fellow Dr. Helena Miton will discuss how scientific and quantitative methods can be used to study cultural phenomena like the spatial composition of European portrait paintings or complex letterforms from around the world.

About the Presenter

Dr. Helena Miton is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, and is affiliated with the Minds and Traditions research group at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology (Jena, Germany). Her research investigates how characteristics of small-scale interactions can impact cultural productions at larger scales, in the context of both technical knowledge and economic practices. Dr Miton holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary). Prior to that, she earned a M.S in Cognitive Science from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and Paris Descartes University, and a B.A in Sociology from Paris Sorbonne University.