From Historical Documents To Social Network Visualization: Potential Pitfalls and Network Modeling

Abstract

We describe the workflow followed by historians when conducting a Historical Social Network Analysis (HSNA) with five steps: textual sources acquisition, digitization, annotation, network creation, and analysis/visualization. While most analysis and visualization tools only support the last step, we argue that addressing the 2-3 last steps would boost the humanists' analytical capabilities. We explain why the network modeling process is particularly challenging and can lead to distortions of the sources, biases, and traceability problems. We list three main properties that we believe the constructed network should satisfy: alignment with reality/documents (not only with concepts), traceability (from documents to analysis/visualization and back), and simplicity (understandable by most and not more complex than needed). We claim that the model of bipartite dynamic multivariate network with roles allows an effective annotation/encoding of historical sources while satisfying these properties. We provide real-world examples of how this model has been used to answer socio-historical questions using visual analytics tools.

ComBiNet: Visual Query and Comparison of Bipartite Multivariate Dynamic Social Networks

“…These are often essential to understanding underlying social phenomena, as time, space and social status play an important role in social dynamics. For these reasons, historical sources and the underlying social phenomena they refer to can be modelled well by bipartite , multivariate dynamic networks with roles [PDC*22, Cri08]. Bipartite means that both persons and documents (or events that are often witnessed by physical documents) are modelled as typed nodes.…”