The works of Mark Lombardi are famous for their elegant narration of various scandals in a globalized world. A profound body of research into the images has already been performed both concerning the stories and the aesthetics of his works.
The project Lombardi Networks that is developed here aims to open new means to electronically analyse Lombardis works:
The mission is to represent all Lombardi works electronically as processable data structures made public via the net and usable for everyone.
A public archive of digital representations of Mark Lombardis works opens new paths for research:
- Imagine electronic analysis on the digitized body of information: I what works does George W. Bush appear? What is the combined narrative of BCCI and Vatican Bank? About what person did Lombardi collect the most relations? What are the differences amongst the 4th and 5th version of George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens, ca 1979–90?
- Imagine an open electronic collection of knowledge on the narratives. Who is Mark Thatcher after all? What happened after Iraq invaded Kuwait? Imagine to scan all of Lombardis index cards and to electronically link them with the nodes.
- Think of a precise and unique identification of every single node and edge in any Lombardi work for unambiguous use in discourses on the works. With that, one could search all research texts on Lombardi refer to a specific node?
- Imagine a serious social network around that information. Who is interested in Lombardi also? Is there a collector close to me who offers to show his works?
This site is is a first experimental step containing some works digitized as networks and providing some services for demonstration. If this is your first visit, do not overlook what is contained in the services page.
Lombardi has already influenced other disciples, for example mathematics. Here, the term “lombardi graphs” has been formally defined and studied to derive algorithms for graph drawing. [Christian A. Duncan, David Eppstein, Michael T. Goodrich. Lombardi Drawings of Graphs. Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications. Vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 37-83 (2012)]
The study of complex networks [M. E. J. Newman. The structure and function of complex networks. SIAM Review 45, 167-256 (2003)] is currently entering many scientific disciplines as a new approach to analyse data. A major reason for that is the availability of computing power to statistically analyse huge networks in reasonable time [Luciano da F.Costa, Osvaldo N. Oliveira Jr., Gonzalo Travieso, Francisco A. Rodrigues, Paulino R. Villas Boas, Lucas Antiqueira, Matheus P. Viana, Luis E. C. da Rocha. Analyzing and Modeling Real-World Phenomena with Complex Networks: A Survey of Applications. Advances in Physics, V. 60(3) p. 329-412 (2011) ]