Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

Faculty Member, Data Archiving and Networked Services

Head of e-Research at DANS

About

Dr. Andrea Scharnhorst is Head of e-Research at the Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) institution in the Netherlands - a large digital archive for research data primarily from the social sciences and humanities. She is also member of the e-humanities group at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam, where she coordinates the computational humanities programme.

She has a background in physics (Diploma in Statistical Physics) and in philosophy of science (PhD on the application of mathematical models to the science system as self-organizing system). Her current work can best be characterized as part of the information sciences.

Her work focuses on understanding, modeling and simulating the emergence of innovations. Hereby, innovations are understood broadly as e.g., new modes of behavior and learning, new forms of communication, new technologies or new scientific ideas. She has worked on the transfer of concepts and methods at an interface between physics; social sciences and humanities. More recently she analyzed the structure and emergence of knowledge orders as visible in library classification systems or the category network of Wikipedia.

Dr. Scharnhorst has developed a specific framework (Geometrically Oriented Evolutionary THEories: GOE_THE) to describe processes of problem solving and learning as an evolutionary search process in unknown knowledge landscapes.

She coordinated and participated in several EU and national funded projects, such as “Web indicators for scientific, technological and innovation research”,”Competence and innovation in research networks - modeling self-organized learning of heterogeneous agents”, “Dissimilar simulation – the epistemics of simulation in the humanities” and “Critical Events in Evolving Networks”. Currently, she leads the working group “Information and Knowledge” of the COST action MP0801 “Physics of Competition and Conflicts”. A computational humanities project on Dutch Census data (CEDAR) she leads started 2011.


She has published extensively in international peer reviewed journals, including co-editing special issues on "Webindicators [Cybermetrics 2006], "Visual conceptualizations and models of science [Journal of informetrics 2009], "Simulating the Social Processes of Science [Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 2011], and "Modeling science: studying the structure and dynamics of science [Scientometrics 2011]. She is on the editorial board of the journal Scientometrics. Together with Andreas Pyka she edited a book on “Innovation networks” for the Springers Series on Complexity in 2009. In the same series an edited book on "Models of Science Dynamics - Encounters Between Complexity Theory and Information Sciences (co-edited with Katy Börner and Peter van den Besselaar) appears in 2012.

Main research interests
- Simulating innovation and Simulation methods as innovation
- Models of self-organization for complex systems
- Innovation dynamics and evolution of social systems 

- Bibliometric analysis and evaluation 

- “Landscape theories of social change”

- Evolution of research technologies, including Web technologies

- Web based science, technology and innovation indicators
- Evolution of classification systems

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