The Network Turn

Abstract

2013, as the leak by Edward Snowden brought to light, the National Security Agency was engaged in massive-scale network analysis using data from nine internet providers.The study and critique of networks has predominantly taken place within the domains of computer science and related scientific fields, the military, and the tech sector due to the scale of digital data being analysed and the nature of the investigations prompting their study. This book not only argues that arts and humanities scholars can use the same kind of visual and quantitative analysis of networks to shed light on the study of culture; it also contends that the critical skills native to humanistic inquiry are vital to the theorisation and critique of our networked world. Network analysis, as we define it in this book, is a set of practices and discourses that sit at the interface of the natural sciences, humanities, social sciences, computer science, and design. We contend that networks are a category of study that cuts across traditional academic boundaries and that has the potential to unite diverse disciplines through a shared understanding of complexity in our worldwhether that complexity pertains to the nature of the interactions of proteins in gene-regulatory networks or to the network of textual variants that can reveal the lineage of a poem. Moreover, this shared framework provides a compelling case for collaboration across those boundaries, for bringing together computational tools for quantitative network analysis, together with theories, discourses, and applied techniques from the social sciences, the humanities, visual design, and art practice.The cases of Lombardi and Barabási provide an instructive way of grasping that shared framework because, superficially, their work has very little in common. Barabási and Albert explicitly cite the computerisation of data acquisition as essential to their research. By contrast, Lombardi's research process was analogue. He gathered his data on three-by-five notecards. There is no evidence that Lombardi read Barabási and Albert's groundbreaking work in statistics and physics; rather, his inspiration was panorama and history painting. He used the term 'narrative structures' to describe his handdrawn webs of connection. Produced through an iterative process of refinement, the work is human in scale, legible visually in its entirety. Perhaps more importantly, it is his interpretation of a carefully researched but inevitably incomplete record. It does not pretend to objectivity. In stark contrast, Barabási 4Publishing and Book Culture

Using network visualizations to engage elementary students in locally relevant data literacy

“…Network representations enhanced students' ability to observe and understand relationships between entities. Net.Create's functionalities of automated live data representation (Ahnert et al, 2020) and multiuser data entry allowed students to collaboratively create and interpret data simultaneously (Drucker, 2015). Along with other features (edge type prompt, nodes' descriptions, etc.…”

“…Statistical information about nodes and edges provides some built-in datacentric features of automated data visualization (e.g. auto-sizing nodes), which can make some hard-to-notice relationships and patterns more visible (Ahnert et al, 2020). In short, network visualizations are powerful vehicles for students to learn analytical and computational skills for data analysis (Cramer et al, 2015) and leverage those skills to solve real-world problems using large-scale data (Pastor-Satorras and Vespignani, 2001).…”

posibilidades del Análisis de Redes Sociales (ARS) aplicado a la Historia del Libro

“…Tanto han crecido las publicaciones que tratan sobre redes en Historia, que ya se habla de un Network Turn. 5 En el presente artículo se ofrece, en primer lugar, una breve introducción a la metodología del ARS aplicado a la Historia, 6 así como un estado de la cuestión sobre el uso del ARS en una rama concreta de la disciplina, la historia del libro. Para concluir, ofreceremos algunos ejemplos prácticos del uso del ARS en historia, extraídos de nuestras propias investigaciones sobre el mercado de libros en la Monarquía Hispánica durante el siglo XVI.…”

Geographical Research in the Digital Humanities

“…Figure 8 (left) shows how this perspective is able to maintain a non-temporal, aggregated network perspective (view from above), but also allows to observe temporal developments and temporal subgraphs from a lateral perspective, to gain insights on various levels of temporal structuration. With this relationaltemporal perspective, all kinds of graph-based modelling approaches to arts and humanities topics (Ahnert et al, 2020) The open and adaptive nature of the polycubistic visualisation framework also allows to reframe existing visualisations with relevance for cultural and historical analyses. Looking at 24 critical dynamics and trends of modern culture in terms of a socio-economic, environmentally situated system, Steffen and colleagues (2015) depict the "great acceleration" that characterises socio-economic and earth system trends in the Anthropocene.…”