Network Analysis is a method to study the relations of (real or fictional) actors or other entities in a mediated network, which can take the form of a social or academic online network, a set of correspondence, or a work of literature; the resulting network is usually made up of nodes (entities) and edges (relations). Relevant techniques include Named Entity Recognition. When the artefacts themselves (texts, images, etc.) and their relations are concerned, the corresponding research activity would be Relational Analysis.
Introduction: Given in French by Mathieu Jacomy – also known for his work on Gephi, this seminar presentation gives a substantial introduction to Hyphe, an open-source web crawler designed by a team of the Sciences Po Medialab in Paris. Specifically devised for the researchers’ use, Hyphe helps collecting and curating a corpus of web pages, through an easy to handle interface.
Introduction: Linked Data and Linked Open Data are gaining an increasing interest and application in many fields. A recent experiment conducted in 2018 at Furman University illustrates and discusses some of the challenges from a pedagogical perspective posed by Linked Open Data applied to research in the historical domain.
“Linked Open Data to navigate the Past: using Peripleo in class” by Chiara Palladino describes the exploitation of the search-engine Peripleo in order to reconstruct the past of four archeologically-relevant cities. Many databases, comprising various types of information, have been consulted, and the results, as highlighted in the contribution by Palladino, show both advantages and limitations of a Linked Open Data-oriented approach to historical investigations.
Introduction: Digital humanists looking for tools in order to visualize and analyze texts can rely on ‘Voyant Tools’ (https://voyant-tools.org), a software package created by S.Sinclair and G.Rockwell. Online resources are available in order to learn how to use Voyant. In this post, we highlight two of them: “Using Voyant-Tools to Formulate Research Questions for Textual Data” by Filipa Calado (GC Digital Fellows and the tutorial “Investigating texts with Voyant” by Miriam Posner.
Introduction: This lesson by Marten Düring from the “Programming Historian-Website” gently introduces novices to the topic to Network Visualisation of Historical Sources. As a case study it covers not only the general advantages of network visualisation for humanists but also a step-by-step explanation of the process from extraction of the data until the visualization (using the Palladio-tool). This lesson has also been translated into Spanish and includes many useful references for further reading.
Introduction: Know Your Implementation: Subgraphs in Literary Networks shows how the online tool ezlinavis can give account of detached subgraphs while working with network analysis of literary texts. For this specific case, Goethe’s Faust, Part One (1808) was analyzed and visualized with ezlinavis, and average distances were calculated giving some new results to this research in relation to Faust as protagonist.
Introduction: This article describes the possibilities offered by the ggplot2 package for network visualization. This R package enables the user to use a wide variety of graphic styles, and to include supplementary information regarding vertices and edges.
Introduction: This article introduces a novel way to unfold and discover patterns in complex texts, at the intersection between macro and micro analytics. This technique is called TIC (Transcendental Information Cascades) allows analysis of how a cast of characters is generated and managed dynamically over the duration of a text.
Introduction: The article discusses how letters are being used across the disciplines, identifying similarities and differences in transcription, digitisation and annotation practices. It is based on a workshop held after the end of the project Digitising experiences of migration: the development of interconnected letters collections (DEM). The aims were to examine issues and challenges surrounding digitisation, build capacity relating to correspondence mark-up, and initiate the process of interconnecting resources to encourage cross-disciplinary research. Subsequent to the DEM project, TEI templates were developed for capturing information within and about migrant correspondence, and visualisation tools were trialled with metadata from a sample of letter collections. Additionally, as a demonstration of how the project’s outputs could be repurposed and expanded, the correspondence metadata that was collected for DEM was added to a more general correspondence project, Visual Correspondence.
Introduction: In the context of medieval and early Tudor texts scholarship, this paper discusses the methodological use of the database not simply to store information, but to clarify points of tension between the questions asked and the information provided in order to find answers.
Introduction: This article presents six different uses of networks based on graph theory in Digital Humanities projects.