Integrated Infodemic Surveillance System: The Case of COVID-19 in South Korea.

This study merges multiple COVID-19 data sources from news articles and social media to propose an integrated infodemic surveillance system (IISS) that implements infodemiology for a well-tailored epidemic management policy. IISS is an à-la-carte infodemic surveillance solution that enables users to gauge the epidemic related consensus, which compiles epidemic-related data from multiple sources and equipped with various methodological toolkits - topic modeling, Word2Vec, and social network analysis. IISS can provide reliable empirical evidence for proper policymaking. We demonstrate the heuristic utilities of IISS using empirical data from the first wave of COVID-19 in South Korea. Measuring discourse congruence allows us to gauge the distance between the discourse corpus from different sources, which can highlight consensus and conflicts in epidemic discourse. Furthermore, IISS detects discrepancies between social concerns and main actors.

Dissecting landscape art history with information theory.

Painting has played a major role in human expression, evolving subject to a complex interplay of representational conventions, social interactions, and a process of historization. From individual qualitative work of art historians emerges a metanarrative that remains difficult to evaluate in its validity regarding emergent macroscopic and underlying microscopic dynamics. The full scope of granular data, the summary statistics, and consequently, also their bias simply lie beyond the cognitive limit of individual qualitative human scholarship. Yet, a more quantitative understanding is still lacking, driven by a lack of data and a persistent dominance of qualitative scholarship in art history. Here, we show that quantitative analyses of creative processes in landscape painting can shed light, provide a systematic verification, and allow for questioning the emerging metanarrative. Using a quasicanonical benchmark dataset of 14,912 landscape paintings, covering a period from the Western renaissance to contemporary art, we systematically analyze the evolution of compositional proportion via a simple yet coherent information-theoretic dissection method that captures iterations of the dominant horizontal and vertical partition directions. Tracing frequency distributions of seemingly preferred compositions across several conceptual dimensions, we find that dominant dissection ratios can serve as a meaningful signature to capture the unique compositional characteristics and systematic evolution of individual artist bodies of work, creation date time spans, and conventional style periods, while concepts of artist nationality remain problematic. Network analyses of individual artists and style periods clarify their rhizomatic confusion while uncovering three distinguished yet nonintuitive supergroups that are meaningfully clustered in time.

Heterogeneity in chromatic distance in images and characterization of massive painting data set.

Painting is an art form that has long functioned as a major channel for the creative expression and communication of humans, its evolution taking place under an interplay with the science, technology, and social environments of the times. Therefore, understanding the process based on comprehensive data could shed light on how humans acted and manifested creatively under changing conditions. Yet, there exist few systematic frameworks that characterize the process for painting, which would require robust statistical methods for defining painting characteristics and identifying human's creative developments, and data of high quality and sufficient quantity. Here we propose that the color contrast of a painting image signifying the heterogeneity in inter-pixel chromatic distance can be a useful representation of its style, integrating both the color and geometry. From the color contrasts of paintings from a large-scale, comprehensive archive of 179 853 high-quality images spanning several centuries we characterize the temporal evolutionary patterns of paintings, and present a deep study of an extraordinary expansion in creative diversity and individuality that came to define the modern era.