network analysis in humanities

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the application of social network analysis methods — drawn from graph theory, sociology, and computer science — to humanistic questions about the structure of relationships between historical actors, literary characters, intellectual communities, correspondence networks, citation structures, and cultural institutions; in digital humanities, network analysis is used to map the social world of Renaissance humanists, trace the spread of ideas through republic of letters correspondence, identify structural patterns in narrative character networks, and analyse citation communities in intellectual history; network visualisation tools including Gephi, Palladio, and Cytoscape have made network methods accessible to humanities researchers without programming expertise, though interpretation of network metrics in historical and literary contexts requires careful attention to the differences between social and cultural networks and the economic or online networks for which many tools were originally designed