Recently, with Dr. Catherine Medici, I presented a workshop at the American Historical Association Conference in Chicago (2019). The 3 hour session sought to introduce the digital humanities tool, Network Analysis, to participants interested in expanding the tools and methods available to them in their research. The following is the description of the workshop provided to the participants:

“Network Analysis: Uncovering the Invisible in Historical Research”

The developing field of network analysis has shown the power of this type of modeling for highlighting relationships, which can not only highlight the major actors, but also illuminate important, lesser known actors within networks. Network analysis algorithms allow examination of and focus on figures that may be important hubs or connectors in networks that have remained invisible or only hinted at with traditional methods. Network analysis methods reveal a wealth of data about individuals and their importance in a network based on their relationships using betweenness and eigenvector centrality measures. In addition, network analysis can expose the infrastructure of networks as well as the strength of ties between individuals in the network. Often, these methods can make the invisible, visible. This workshop will provide an introduction to these methods and provide hands-on experience to those interested in learning about the potential of network analysis.

The workshop consisted of the following:

• Showing how networks are used in scholarship
• Showing how we can use networks in the classroom and in research

• Activities that demonstrated the basic principles of network analysis.

• Discussion of the various outcomes of the activity examining the ways that decisions throughout the data collection and curation process affect visualizations and the information gained from network analysis.

• The final portion of the workshop discussed how network analysis may be useful to participants’ own work, along with the various issues involved.
• The workshop helped participants familiarize themselves with basic network-analysis vocabulary as well as using the programs known as Gephi and Palladio for network analysis and visualization.

Bibliography & Resources

Gephi: https://gephi.org/

Palladio: https://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/

Resources: http://historicalnetworkresearch.org/

Glossary of Network Analysis Terms: https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Glossary_of_network_analysis_terms

Digital Tools for Textual Analysis: https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Digital_tools_for_textual_analysis

The Programming Historian for Tutorials, Resources, etc.: https://programminghistorian.org/

Christopher Warren et al., “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: A Statistical Method for Reconstructing Large Historical Social Networks,”Digital Humanities Quarterly 10, no. 3 (July 2016): http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/3/000244/000244.html.

Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, ‘Protestant Letter networks in the Reign of Mary I: A Quantitative Approach’, English Literary Heritage 82:1 (2015) 1-33.

Project Examples:

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: http://www.sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com/?ids=10000473&min_confidence=60&type=network

Shakeosphere: https://shakeosphere.lib.uiowa.edu/

Kindred Britain: http://kindred.stanford.edu/#