Networks For Fun and Profit!

Good ol’ networks. There’s a whole journal for them in historical research.

At some point, you’ll come across gephi. It has a lite version but that requires writing networks in the .gexf format.

Gephi can help transform your data into a variety of network formats. There are nodelists, edgelists, adjaceny matrices… easiest way to get started is to make a csv in an ‘edgelist’ format, eg, you list pairs of relationships:

source,target
shawn,tony
shawn,captain_america
captain_america,shawn
tony,buddy
buddy,abby
abby,shawn

you can even have other columns with more information about the nature of that relationship, eg, ‘strength’, or ‘weight’. For adding attributes to the nodes themselves, we can do that by creating a node table and then importing it in gephi to an existing network. But it’s fiddly. Doable, but a pain.