Networks
Networks
Understanding connections.
Brief
The idea of a network is fundamental to our experience of social media, and the concept of a network can be applied to many areas of contemporary life. Wherever it is possible to define a system of elements or entities that are connected by explicit relations, it may be possible to employ network analysis to create a better understanding of that system.
These systems may include social networks (both real and fictional), literary influences, investor relationships, and many more things.
Learning Objectives
- Understand how relationships within a network can reveal influences that would otherwise remain hidden
- Understand key concepts and terminology related to networks: "node," "edge," "degree," "closeness", and so on.
- Use software to create and analyze a network visualization
- Experiment with applications of network analysis to understand complicated textual systems
Options and Variations
- Create a social graph. Start a graph on paper with yourself as a node. Draw other nodes for people in your life (family, friends, roommates, teammates) and add edges with labels specific to the type of relationship you share. Draw similar edges between all nodes, as many as you can think of. Reproduce this in Kumu and use social network analysis to reveal the most influential connections in your social graph.
- Analyze a Twitter network. Use TAGS to create an archive of tweets that use a particular phrase or hashtag. Import that data into Gephi to create a visualization of key influencers within that network.
- Analyze a literary work. Create a social graph for characters in a literary work, mapping the same kinds of relationships you created for yourself. Then, in addition to those characters' social relationships, record and graph instances of collocation or occasions when two characters appear on the same page. Are there any surprising differences between these two graphs?
- Analyze characters in a TV series. Create a social graph for characters in a film or TV series. Map their social relationships, then create a series of connections indicating when those characters have appeared in the same episode or scene.
Resources and Tools
Palladio
Visualize complex historical data with ease.
TAGS
Automatically archive tweets in a Google spreadsheet.
Kumu
Organize complex data into relationship maps.
Gephi
Visualization and exploration software for all kinds of graphs and networks.
igraph
Python and R packages for data visualizations.
Project Gutenberg
Over 70,000 ebooks available for free.
Programming Historian
Tutorials for a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows.
Bibliography
Grunewald, Susan, and Andrew Janco. “Finding Places in Text with the World Historical Gazeteer.” Programming Historian, February 11, 2022. https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/finding-places-world-historical-gazetteer.
Hayes, Erica Y., and Mia Partlow. “Displaying a Georeferenced Map in KnightLab’s StoryMap JS.” Programming Historian, May 16, 2022. https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/displaying-georeferenced-map-knightlab-storymap-js.
jengolbeck. Updated Gephi Quick Start Tutorial for v 0.9, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=371n3Ye9vVo&list=PLk_jmmkw5S2BqnYBqF2VNPcszY93-ze49.
Visconti, Amanda. “Get Your Data into Gephi: A Quick and Basic Tutorial.” Literature Geek, September 9, 2013. http://literaturegeek.com/2013/09/09/dataintogephi.
Weingart, Scott. “Demystifying Networks, Parts I & II.” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 1 (2011). https://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/demystifying-networks-by-scott-weingart/.
