Historical Network Analysis - An Introduction

Confronted with the massification of data and embracing ever more global questions, historical sciences are concerned with increasingly complex objects. And if the term « network » is widely used in historical research, it is because it seems to be effective to describe these tangled, evolutionary and multi-level structures. This introduction offers a reflection on the use of formal network analysis in history. We show that there are several ways of transforming historical sources into a network and that we can use multi-layer models to understand the complexity of an archival collection. To go further, a few online publications: Grandjean 2019 EN https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02531735, Grandjean 2018 FR https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01853903, Grandjean 2017 FR https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01610098v2 IT https://dx.doi.org/10.14647/87204. -- Contents -- 00:00 - Introduction 00:35 - Giving context to a relation 05:21 - Graph theory 13:21 - Historical networks 18:39 - A Complex case study 24:02 - Multilayer network 30:58 - Conclusion