Introduction to Social Network Analysis [5/5]: Complex Situations

Workshop by Martin Grandjean (Université de Lausanne) at the Conference HNR+ResHist2021 Conference "Historical Networks - Réseaux Historiques - Historische Netzwerke co-organised by HNR and ResHist.

This workshop, intended for a beginner audience, proposes to review the main concepts of social network analysis (terminology, visual analysis, centrality measures, communities, etc.) while highlighting the challenges that arise when analyzing relational historical objects. After an introduction to the basics of network analysis, we will provide an overview of the application of these methods in the historical sciences: there is no single way to extract a network from historical sources and this has implications for the types of analysis that can be done, sometimes creating biases that we must be aware of. And what is generally the status of network analysis in such research, is it a heuristic tool or just an illustration?

We will then look at the question of „translating“ the concepts and results of network analysis into a historical research. For example: how should betweenness centrality be interpreted? should community detection be used? can I trust the clusters that appear in the visual analysis?

To conclude, we will propose some reflections on the main difficulties of historical network analysis, between temporality analysis and multilevel system modeling.

[gonzalorenatoquintanazunin]

What a great introductory course. Thank you so much!

[Splines]

Thank you so much Martin Grandjean for this great introductory series. The graphics were beautiful and really helped to emphasize and understand the points you made. I think it's really important to gather a basic understanding of the problem first and have a strong motivation and also see how this field of science evolved over time and how it started. You definitely reached your goal to make me think and dive deeper.

[BioSlayer]

Great touching on temporality. A network is a snapshot frozen in time. If you think of Time as an emergent physical property, not as a ticking clock, you can see a network evolves say through wiring and rewiring of nodes as they age and die at the experimental or theoretical rate you give them. Here differential and difference equations become handy for describing time equations for each node.

[Sophieseee]

Un Super Grand merci! This series of lectures was very informative and clear - especially for someone who is not in the Historical field. The concepts were clear and very transferrable into my area of marine ecology :D fingers crossed I get to try this out!

[petrusgimbad]

Interesting - still above my head but can see the real world application and its uses.

[elisedermineur]

What software would you use for creating a multi-layered network?

[movimientoinformativo]

where can i look for more information about this?

[abolfazlmohebbi]

It was a really informative and useful video series. Thanks a lot for that. However, as a novice person in this field, I realized the series was more focused on "Visualization" rather than "Analysis". Hence, I think the title of the videos can be a bit misleading.