This introduction is both a statement of a research problem and an account of the first research results for its solution. As more historical databases come online and overlap in coverage, we need to discuss the two main issues that prevent 'big' results from emerging so far. Firstly, historical data are seen by computer science people as unstructured, that is, historical records cannot be easily decomposed into unambiguous fields, like in population (birth and death records) and taxation data. Secondly, machine-learning tools developed for structured data cannot be applied as they are for historical research. We propose a complex network, narrative-driven approach to mining historical databases. In such a time-integrated network obtained by overlaying records from historical databases, the nodes are actors, while thelinks are actions. In the case study that we present (the world as seen from Venice, 1205-1533), the actors are governments, while the actions are limited to war, trade, and treaty to keep the case study tractable. We then identify key periods, key events, and hence key actors, key locations through a time-resolved examination of the actions. This tool allows historians to deal with historical data issues (e.g., source provenance identification, event validation, trade-conflict-diplomacy relationships, etc.). On a higher level, this automatic extraction of key narratives from a historical database allows historians to formulate hypotheses on the courses of history, and also allow them to test these hypotheses in other actions or in additional data sets. Our vision is that this narrative-driven analysis of historical data can lead to the development of multiple scale agent-based models, which can be simulated on a computer to generate ensembles of counterfactual histories that would deepen our understanding of how our actual history developed the way it did. The generation of such narratives, automatically and in a scalable way, will revolutionize the practice of history as a discipline, because historical knowledge, that is the treasure of human experiences (i.e. the heritage of the world), will become what might be inherited by machine learning algorithms and used in smart cities to highlight and explain present ties and illustrate potential future scenarios and visionarios.

The objective of this essay is to propose a cultural history of cosmography and cartography from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. It focuses on some of the processes that characterized these fields of knowledge, using mainly western European sources. First, it elucidates the meaning that the term cosmography held during the period under consideration, and the scientific status that this composite field of knowledge enjoyed, pointing to the main processes that structured cosmography between the thirteenth century and the sixteenth century. I then move on to expound the circulation of cosmographic knowledge among Portugal, Venice and Lisbon in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This analysis will show how cartography and cosmography were produced at the interface of articulated commercial, diplomatic and scholarly networks; finally, the last part of the essay focuses on the specific and quite distinctive use of cosmography in fifteenth-century European culture: the representation of "geo-political" projects on the world through the reformulation of the very concepts of sea and maritime networks. This last topic will be developed through the study of Fra Mauro's mid-fifteenth-century visionary project about changing the world connectivity through the linking of several maritime and fluvial networks in the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean Sea basin, involving the circumnavigation of Africa. This unprecedented project was based on a variety of sources accumulated in the Mediterranean Sea basin as well as in Asia and in the Indian Ocean over the course of several centuries.

We describe a vision of historical analysis at the world scale, through the digital assembly of historical sources into a cloud-based database, where machine-learning techniques can be used to summarize the database into a time-integrated actor-to-actor complex network. Using this time-integrated network as a template, we then apply the method of automatic narratives to discover key actors ('who'), key events ('what'), key periods ('when'), key locations ('where'), key motives ('why'), and key actions ('how') that can be presented as hypotheses to world historians. We show two test cases on how this method works. To accelerate the pace of knowledge discovery and verification, we describe how historians would interact with these automatic narratives through an online, map-based knowledge aggregator that learns how scholars filter information, and eventually takes over this function to free historians from the more important tasks of verification, and stitching together coherent storylines. Ultimately, multiple coherent storylines that are not necessary compatible with each other can be discovered through human-computer interactions by the map-based knowledge aggregator.

This paper, as a conlcusion to this special issue, presents the future work that is being carried out at NTU Singapore in collaboration with Microsoft Research and Microsoft Azure for Research. For our research team the real frontier research in world histories starts when we want to use computers to structure historical information, model historical narratives, simulate theoretical large scale hypotheses, and incent world historians to use virtual assistants and/or engage them in teamwork using social media and/or seduce them with immersive spaces to provide new learning and sharing environments, in which new things can emerge and happen: "You do not know which will be the next idea. Just repeating the same things is not enough" (Carlo Rubbia, 1984 Nobel Price in Physics, at Nanyang Technological University on January 19, 2016).

This essay critically analyses the legacy of Eisenstadt's The Political Systems of Empires for the comparative political history of pre-industrial empires. It argues that Eisenstadt has given us a rich toolkit to conceptualize the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of empires by theorizing the structural relationships between social groups in large-scale polities and among such polities, and by analysing global patterns of development in the distribution of the sources of social power. The Political Systems of Empires provides an inventory of key questions and dynamics that a comparative history of power relationships in empires cannot ignore. This essay, furthermore, discusses three methodological problems in Eisenstadt's work which have had a significant impact on comparative empire studies between the 1980s and the 2000s. The essay argues that certain shared features of comparative studies of pre-industrial empires help perpetuate Eurocentric analyses: the foregrounding of select empires and periods as ideal types (typicality), the focus on macro-historical structures and dynamics without the integration of social relationships and actions in historical conjunctures (the lack of scalability), and the search for convergence and divergence. These features need to be overcome to make Eisenstadt's legacy viable for comparative political history.