Historical network research often relies on links formed through specific interactions among historical entities, such as family relationships, political alliances, or correspondence. While these approaches have proven insightful, this study highlights the potential of another one: co-occurrence networks of historical entities. Using biographical data from Wikidata, I construct co-occurrence networks based on the idea that two entities are connected if a significant number of individuals are linked to both. As examples, I construct three separate co-occurrence networks: ancient Roman administrative positions, 20th-century conflicts, and modern German political parties. Graphical representations of these networks are presented, and the centrality values of the nodes are calculated. The analysis of the Ancient Roman network shows that positions like "proconsul" and "magister equitum," despite having fewer members, exhibit high closeness and betweenness centrality, making them critical for connecting other influential roles. In the 20th-century conflicts network, major global events like the world wars emerge as central nodes, while the "Vietnam War" displays high betweenness centrality, acting as a bridge between earlier and later conflicts. The German political parties network reveals clear ideological and temporal partitions, highlighting divisions between left-oriented and right-oriented parties, with further separations between historical and contemporary groups. These examples demonstrate that historical co-occurrence networks can yield meaningful results. They simplify complex data into clear network structures and adapt flexibly to diverse contexts where direct interaction data is limited. These qualities show that co-occurrence networks can offer insights alongside other network approaches.

Existing scholarship has shed light on structural barriers women faced in gaining intellectual recognition in the development of early modern science. While traditional research has given us insights into singular cases, a more comprehensive understanding of women’s presence (or lack thereof) is still to be identified. This study explores the application of network analysis to uncover the often-overlooked contributions of women in early modern science.

We employ a combination of distant reading, close reading, and network analysis. We cross reference a dataset of over mentions from over 400 works on early modern natural philosophy with datasets of early modern female authors, to investigate their appearance in the literature. Through a feminist archival approach, the study integrates data from different archives to identify explicit mentions of women in scientific discourse, as well as implicit, such as by proxy of a male scientist. Using networks to analyse these references to women scientists, who are typically absent from historiographical narratives, allows us to investigate their presence as embedded within the broader field of natural philosophy. Findings highlight the appearance of explicit references to for instance Maria Agnesi, and Laura Bassi, as well as indirect presences, such as Maria Margaretha Kirch and Caroline Herschel.

In this presentation, we showcase how we can integrate approaches from digital humanities, network science, and feminist history to create an integrated, more nuanced understanding of the past. We offer an examination of how archiving practices such as reparative description and counter-archiving can challenge biases in historical data representation.

The history of consumer credit in Europe goes back several hundred years. Extensive evidence of widespread consumer credit networks exists for Florence in the fifteenth century, earlier than much economic historiography penetrates. Summary transcriptions of account books in the 1420s and 1430s document myriad credit relations between dozens (actually, hundreds) of companies and shops on the one hand and thousands of Florentine households on the other in two-mode network form. Specifically, there is copious qualitative and quantitative evidence of high-quality Florentine cloth being sold on account to Florentine households, a very substantial part of the market under-examined relative to Florentine merchants’ export of high-quality cloth abroad. Descriptive analysis shows that consumer credit ties are distributed unevenly: some companies did much more local business than others. At the same time, most companies dealt with households of relatively similar wealth levels, and they trafficked in both high- and medium-quality cloth; there was little market ‘segmentation’ by wealth or luxury level. Family and neighborhood homophily are only weak predictors of who does business with whom; they were at most the core of wider networks of consumer credit. What structure does exist beyond market imperatives may have arisen due to baked-in accidental patterns of the past, or it may be linked to patterns within and across networks of personal credit exchanges and networks of company-to-company relationships of financing, production, and distribution. Concerning the latter, I intend to use ERGM modeling to explore some of the complex cross-network connections within Florence’s multiple-network ecology.

This project seeks to characterize the disappearance of the Pacific Electric rail system in Los Angeles County between 1911 and 1961. This system was the largest light rail system in the United States, accounting for nearly 5% of all rail laid at one point. Existing work, primarily qualitative has pointed to a variety of top down pressures such as the rise of the automobile, highway construction and revenue related concerns in the demise of Pacific Electric. However, these have often neglected the spatial component of such networks, leaving a significant gap in understanding how these larger forces played out at a system level. Los Angeles is a unique case due to the unique urbanization and suburbanization patterns driven by such an expansive system. Utilizing spatial network analysis of network representations of the rail system in five year intervals, I draw on community detection algorithms as a way of measuring fragmentation. I demonstrate that the patterns of rail closure created a system that was more cohesive than random and closely resembled a modern transit system in structure, pointing to the preservation of several key arteries. I then combine these results with archival documents concerning public commissions hearings, newspaper articles and other urban planning documents while also pointing to two periods of rapid network shrinkage in the late 1930s and late 1940s. This project highlights the need to study historic rail transit systems utilizing network analysis to better understand spatial and urban patterns and the interaction of transit and social structures.

This study examines gender bias in the investigative practices of medieval inquisitors, focusing on Albert of Castellario’s 1335 trial of the Waldensians in Giaveno, Italy. Situating our analysis within sociological and criminological frameworks, we conceptualize inquisitorial trials as structured yet discretionary information-gathering processes shaped by the inquisitor's judgments about which leads to follow and which testimonies to prioritize. Employing social network analysis and survival methods, we evaluate whether Albert demonstrated gendered biases in his investigative decisions, particularly regarding the weight assigned to testimonies from men versus women. Our findings demonstrate that Albert systematically prioritized testimonies from male informants, even when similar levels of incriminating evidence were present for both genders. This bias highlights the significant role of societal gender norms in shaping inquisitorial practices, raising questions about the reliability and representativeness of historical records of heretical movements. Beyond showing Albert’s gendered biases, this study underscores the broader utility of our methodological framework for addressing related historical inquiries, including the political motivations behind the medieval inquisition.

Luc Boltanski, in his book Investigations and Conspiracies, explores the modern detective novel as an expression of political imagination. The author posits that this genre was a specific product of the 19th-century nation-state. Detectives and investigators acted as guardians and monitors of the nation-state’s function of ensuring and upholding justice, whose stability was threatened by external and internal enemies.

The English and French states developed different methods of exercising power, which were reflected in their criminal novels. In England, detectives—such as the most famous, Sherlock Holmes—operated primarily within the social sphere of the elite. The English state was built on a compromise between the Crown and Parliament, so secrets and crimes had the potential to weaken this class's power. In the French context, represented by Commissioner Maigret, the source of order lay in the administration, which unified classes into the singular organism of the Republic.

My interest lies in the Second Polish Republic—a state that existed from 1918 to 1939. The history of this short-lived political entity was tumultuous and encompassed two developmental visions. Since the Second Polish Republic was a relatively new state with an unestablished administrative structure, the paths of interaction for the main characters could resemble both the contexts depicted in English and French novels. Investigators might remain within their own class (elites) or traverse various social environments.

I analyze a corpus of criminal novels from the Crime Stories of Pre-War Warsaw series to reconstruct the map of relationships detectives and investigators engage in. For the analysis, I employ the extraction of interpersonal relationships within the texts. This involves the automatic detection of individuals mentioned in the text and the verb expressions connecting them (at the sentence level). The next step is to reconstruct the network in each novel, where each character is a node, and direct interactions between two or more characters serve as edges (e.g., "Krzysztof took Hanna for a car ride, Szalski listened to their conversation from the back seat"). This approach goes beyond the previously used conversational network extractions (Elson et al., 2010) to reconstruct a map of all social relationships between characters in the novels (Lee & Yeung, 2012).

Subsequently, the ego-network of the main character is analyzed, encoding the class positions of surrounding characters and the investigator himself. This analysis infers measures of the character’s social embeddedness within the environment surrounding him and his investigation. The study will reveal whether the social trajectories of Polish investigators resemble the republican (multi-class/mosaic) consciousness of Maigret, the elitist approach of Holmes, or present a unique quality specific to the ephemeral political organism that was the Second Polish Republic.

Inquisitions were established by the Catholic Church in the 13th century to systematically investigate and suppress religious dissent through formal trial procedures. These trials were led by papally appointed inquisitors and documented by notaries, working to gather incriminating evidence against individuals through testimonies. Extant inquisition registers allow us to extract historical incrimination networks, but also raise methodological questions about their optimal representation and analysis. Given the virtual irrevocability of incriminations, we can conceptualize them as quasi-states and use Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to study the long-term aggregated characteristics of incriminations. However, the ERGM model needs to be adapted to account for the inquisitors' practice of summoning individuals. We can conceptualize incriminations as dyadic events and apply Dynamic Network Actor Models (DyNAM) to focus on individual decision-making patterns. However, as one deponent could incriminate multiple others, Relational Hyperevent Models (RHEM) might be more appropriate as they account for the polyadic nature of incriminations. In this talk, we compare these three approaches by applying them to incrimination networks collected from multiple medieval inquisition registers.

Historians are pre-occupied with telling ‘what happened’. Even so, how they do so in a digital context is confounded by a simple dilemma: how can history itself – not just its lists of places, people, or artifacts - be represented as structured data? Historical scholars are avid users of computation, but there remains no sure model for considering history-as-data. Conversely, existing models for structured data for events or actions are not only not historiographically robust, most reify historical events - something antithetical to modern historical theories and philosophical premises around what constitutes history itself. Networks provide a solution, but their use requires a clear approach to types of nodes and a vocabulary of edges.

Nanohistory.org is an open-source prototype platform designed to test drive the degree to which history itself can be represented as structured data using network and graph theory as the interface between computation and historical theories.

This paper will outline its theoretical foundations to illustrate how creation of the smallest historical forms possible, the nanohistory (a statement of historical action cast as a named directed graph), allows for the documentation and analysis of more complex historical phenomena that is historiographically robust, and well-structured data. Nanohistory.org functions as a digital annal, capturing provenance, agency, and multi-vocality in a way that is both machine and human readable. Rendering historical knowledge as a discursive narrative network positions history-as-data between the lists and datasets of historical evidence, and the prose of historical scholarship. The result is transformation of historical discourse into a multi-dimensional ergodic k-partite network, complete with histories’ multi-faceted pathways, mapping conflict, colligation, and confluence across a variety of historical records.

This paper examines the Dutch Cape Colony. Serial sources make it possible to reconstruct social networks that provide insight into the initial social conditions of this settlement. Baptism registers, in particular, are highly suitable for this purpose, as they document the majority of the Christian population. By combining these data with lists of colonial officials, it becomes possible to assess the extent to which colonial authorities were open to interaction with the broader population. The Cape Colony was originally established as a refreshment station, and in the early years of settlement, there were no particularly attractive factor endowments, such as cash crops or minerals. According to new institutional economists, this would suggest that the Cape Colony was more likely to develop open-access institutions. However, access to power in the early modern period should not be equated with participation in the political system. Genuine democracy had not yet emerged, which is why it is more appropriate to speak of access rather than participation. To better understand this, it is essential to study the networks of those in power. Network research can reveal the extent to which the political elite remained closed off or engaged with the broader population. Scholars such as Putnam have previously argued that broad, open networks can be considered a form of social capital that contributes to a well-functioning society and political system.

The Reform War (1858-1860) was one of the most violent and politically polarized conflicts of 19th-century Mexico. The Liberal victory led to an official historical narrative that oversimplified the war, obscuring the complexities of wartime society. To challenge this simplification, we analyze personal diaries as firsthand accounts that reveal the structure and dynamics of wartime social networks. In previous research, we reconstructed the social network of Juan de Vildósola’s Diary using natural language processing (NLP), text mining, and network science. The resulting network, modeled as a subgraph of a larger system with a Barabási-Albert structure, uncovered key actors, affiliations, and interactions within his social sphere. Expanding this approach, we analyze four additional diaries from the same period, written by individuals with diverse political affiliations. Using NLP, we extract and normalize entity mentions to reconstruct social networks, comparing structural patterns across different perspectives. This study validates previous findings while offering new insights into how personal experiences shaped social relations during the war. Our research highlights the potential of network analysis for reinterpreting historical processes, addressing key challenges in historical network research such as data incompleteness, ambiguity, and bias in personal accounts. By demonstrating how personal diaries serve as valuable datasets for social network reconstruction, we provide a methodological foundation for further studies on civil conflicts through computational and relational approaches.

In 1963, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, launched a global initiative to honour the Righteous Among the Nations (RAN) - non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. While some rescuers acted alone, historical evidence suggests that many operated within rescue communities - loosely connected or structured networks that provided shelter, forged documents, illegal transfer, food, and other life-saving assistance.

This study applies Social Network Analysis (SNA), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Large Language Models (LLMs) to examine the structure and evolution of these networks. Using 10,903 rescue cases from the Yad Vashem Archives, it constructs a dynamic multiplex network of rescuers in Poland, integrating ties based on shared rescue activities, family relationships, organizational affiliations, and common narratives. A novel text-based entity extraction method uncovers previously undetected connections, enhancing the reconstruction of social ties.

The analysis examines two key periods: June 1941 - Late 1942, marked by Operation Barbarossa, mass murder escalation, and ghetto liquidations, and Late 1942 - January 1945, when intensified Nazi persecution led to evolving rescue efforts. Findings suggest that document forgery and illegal transfer were likely facilitated by previously undocumented rescue communities, while mixed-gender collaborations and family networks played a crucial role in sustaining rescue operations.

This study advances historical network research by demonstrating how computational approaches can address gaps in incomplete and ambiguous historical data. It offers a scalable framework for analysing rescue networks in extreme conditions, with broader implications for historical and contemporary humanitarian studies.

The jackal-headed god Anubis was worshipped alongside a small group of other Egyptian gods across the Mediterranean during the Roman period, part of a religious movement that at one point rivalled Christianity in popularity. The other Egyptian gods revered within this movement (Isis, Serapis, Osiris and Harpocrates) were all depicted in human form, in contrast to their depiction in Egypt. Only Anubis retained his animal shape. Much previous scholarship has assumed that Anubis, as an animal god, was aberrant to the vast majority of people in the Roman empire. The literary evidence certainly presents a negative view of him. Yet a closer analysis of other forms of evidence shows that the lived reality was more complex and Anubis was warmly received by many people across a wide social spectrum and in different regions across the Roman Empire.

I have analysed the god Anubis within three different case studies: Alexandria, Delos and Pompeii. I have chosen these regions for two reasons. First, the nature of the evidence is especially strong for Delos and Pompeii, which enables me to analyse Anubis within a local context and create networks of the different gods attested in surviving evidence from the two towns. Second, these three points are nodes on the supposed route of transmission of the Isiac cults via the maritime trade network from Alexandria via Delos (an important trading port in the Aegean) and on to Pompeii (close to Pozzuoli which was the major international port in Italy at the time). If this theory holds true, we would expect a similar network in the three locations, but there are crucial differences.

I looked at centrality measures to understand embeddedness in local pantheons (or groups of gods). The network connections are formed when the gods are mentioned together in the same piece of evidence. For example, in inscriptions carved on walls in buildings or temples, often recording donations, dedicated to groups of gods. Creating a network of such connections, means I have been able to analyse how entities were believed to relate to one another within a local pantheon. By doing this, I have been able to understand: how connected was Anubis to other gods; whether Anubis replaced Greco-Roman gods; the relative importance of different gods and powers. As a result of this approach, I am able to identify powers and qualities associated with Anubis that are different to those put forward in previous scholarship.