Network Analysis and Visualisation in the Humanities
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Increasingly digital scholarship is expanding to look not just at discrete objects but to better understand the relationships between persons, places and things. A popular way of discovering patters and deriving new knowledge about these relationships involved visual appreciation of the relationship between data and objects and ultimately the real world phenomenon that they proxy for or abstractly represent.
In this hands-on workshops we explored a number of tools, with emphasis on using Gephi to explore relationships and understand the terminology and processes involved in rendering your data to aid analysis and understanding. This workshop assumed no prior experience with relationship mapping or with network visualisation tools. It is intended to provide a soft introduction to graph theory, and network visualisation techniques so that you might discover unique ways that it may aid your scholarship.
Examples
- Mapping Shakespeare’s Tragedies – Martin Grandjean
- Exploring Dáil Data – Dave Kelly
- How else? Dáil Ngram Viewer – Derek Greene
- The Star Wars Social Network – Evelina Gabasova
- The Power Players – The People and Tech Behind the Panama Papers – icij
Resources
- Social Network Analysis – John Scott
- Demystifying Networks – Scott Weingart
- Formal network methods in history: why and how? – Claire Lemercier
- From Hermeneutics to Data to Networks: Data Extraction and Network Visualization of Historical Sources – Marten Düring
- More Networks in the Humanities or Did books have DNA? – Elijah Meeks
- An Introduction to Social Network Methods – Robert A. Hanneman and Mark Riddle
- Practical Social Network Analysis Using Gephi – Derek Greene
- Networks, Crowds and Markets – Easley and Kleinberg
- Mastering Gephi Network Visualisation – Ken Chevron
- GEPHI – Introduction to Network Analysis and Visualisation – Martin Grandjean
- How to explore a network graph of electronic literature in Gephi – Jill Walker Rettberg
- Some Fun Datasets to Play with – Gephi GITHub
Slidedeck
Advance Steps – Reading and Installation
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Install
If you would like to play along – and please do – in advance of lecture please visit gephi.org and install the software on your own laptop.Note: The current stable version of Gephi will only run with Java 7 or 8. On Mac OS X, Java is bundled with the application so it doesn’t have to be installed separately. On Windows and Linux, the system must be equipped with Java.
Installation instructions are available on the download page: https://gephi.org/users/install/
- Test your Gephi Install by launching Gephi and choosing to open ‘Les Miserables.gexf’ from the screen presented.
