Introduction to Social Network Analysis: Basics and Historical Specificities

Martin Grandjean (1)

1 UNIL - Université de Lausanne = University of Lausanne

This communication, 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.

Mots clés: network analysis; Social Network Analysis; SNA; Digital History; Historical Network Research; Graph theory; Networks

Domaines: Méthodes et statistiques; Sciences de l'information et de la communication; Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences; Histoire; Complexité [cs.CC]; Réseaux sociaux et d'information [cs.SI]; Ordinateur et société [cs.CY]; Base de données [cs.DB]

Martin Grandjean. Introduction to Social Network Analysis: Basics and Historical Specificities. HNR+ResHist Conference 2021, Historical Network Research, 2021, Luxembourg, Luxembourg. ⟨10.5281/zenodo.5083036⟩. ⟨halshs-03351755⟩