Encoding Socio-Historical Exegesis as Social Physics Predicates

This paper concerns developments in social physics rule and schema authoring made as part of the ongoing VESPACE project, a multinational research effort in developing a social physics driven virtual reality experience set in eighteenth-century France. Central to the theoretical application of social physics in this socio-historical context is the concept of citation as AI– that is, the historically-grounded reconstruction of human behavior represented by cited schemata, rules, and actions. In order to facilitate the authoring of domain-specific rules for the Ensemble social physics engine by history and cultural studies experts, we endeavored to develop a new collaborative authoring tool, which we tested in a series of workshops. The results of these workshops revealed various domain needs, as well as the shortcomings of representing data structures using one-to-one correspondences in UX/UI design.