Week 7 - Nov. 9

Location Our Normal Classroom

Theme Networks: social, knowledge, and others. Agent Based Models.

Have Read for Today

• Brughmans, Tom. 2010. “Connecting the dots: Towards archaeological network analysis” Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 29:3, 277–303 link. Available through our library proxy

• Mills, Barbara. 2017. “Social Network Analysis in Archaeology”. Annual Review of Anthropology 46:379-397. link

• Romanowska, I., Crabtree, S. A., Harris, K. and Davies, B. 2019: Agent-Based Modeling for Archaeologists: Part 1 of 3. Advances in Archaeological Practice 7 (2). 178–84. link (This also comes with a tutorial for the Netlogo language; feel free to read that too if you want)

• Optional: Graham S, Yates D, El-Roby A, Brousseau C, Ellens J, McDermott C. Relationship Prediction in a Knowledge Graph Embedding Model of the Illicit Antiquities Trade. Advances in Archaeological Practice. 2023;11(2):126-138. link The point of sharing this piece with you is to illustrate that there are ways of exploring the latent spaces between the nodes and edges of a network, and that this is a way of surfacing ideas ‘hiding’ in our knowledge that we didn’t initially spot.

The Plan A discussion of how a networked perspective on archaeological data opens up new ways of seeing the past. Then, a further excursion into how archaeological networks can be reanimated.

Skill Building

• We’ll build a network of a small farming community from a small rural cemetery
• We’ll load a networked representation of the Roman Empire into a Google Colab notebook and calculate some network perspectives on it.
• We’ll try to build an agent based model of information (or disease?) diffusion on top of the Roman empire’s urban topology

Homework By Friday at noon, have your research compendium for this week complete and in github. You might want to consider the perils of looking at the world through a network lens - and the potentials. Have you encountered this kind of approach in your history classes? What would your other professors make of all this?

The ORBIS geospatial network model of the Roman world

ORBIS is a multimodal, seasonally variable transportation network model available at orbis.stanford.edu. The model provides for practically unlimited permutations by allowing users to limit modes, change movement cost, and adjust time of year. However, it is as a more simple network that ORBIS can be usefully integrated into other research, such as historical environmental reconstruction or agent-based modeling set in the Roman world. (Scheidel, Weiland and Arcenas 2014)

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Historical Cemetery Network Dataset

I’ll give you some information I cooked up regarding a small family cemetery. Your goal is to create a new python or R notebook in Google Colab where you load the data in and do some analyzes.

1. take this data, and make a new text file (remember, you never use Word for something like this. Use a text editor (and if you don’t recall what I mean by that, just ask). Represent the data provided to you below as an ‘edgelist’ where you list out the relationships. You need to have at least a ‘source’ and ‘target’ column, eg:

source,target
alice,bob

You might want to have more columns. When you save the txt file, CHANGE THE FILE EXTENSION to end with .csv, eg: graveyard_net.csv.

Then,

1. make a new python or R notebook
2. load the data in
3. visualize the data
4. determine one or two metrics for the data.

Hint In python, you can load the data with pandas: edges_df = pd.read_csv('edges.csv')

In R, you can load it in with igraph: links <- read.csv("edges.csv", header=T, as.is=T)

Each family seemed to have its own section in the cemetery.

Thompson Family

Person	Birth Year	Death Year	Notes
John Thompson	1820	1889	Patriarch, miller
Mary Thompson	1823	1891	Wife of John
Sarah Thompson	1847	1923	Eldest daughter
Robert Thompson	1849	1901	Son, took over mill
James Thompson	1851	1934	Youngest son
Alice Thompson	1872	1945	Robert’s wife

Hayes Family

Person	Birth Year	Death Year	Notes
William Hayes	1825	1895	Blacksmith, business partner to John
Elizabeth Hayes	1828	1901	Wife of William
Thomas Hayes	1850	1918	Son, continued blacksmithing
Margaret Hayes	1852	1925	Daughter, schoolteacher
Robert Thomson and Margaret Hayes		joint headstone?
Catherine Miller	1875	1942	Daughter, Thomas
David Hayes	1877	1950	Thomas’s son

Miller Family

Person	Birth Year	Death Year	Notes
Samuel Miller	1815	1882	Town doctor
Ruth Miller	1818	1885	Wife of Samuel
Benjamin Miller	1845	1920	Son, also doctor
Hannah Miller	1848	1929	Daughter, midwife
Edward Miller	1870	1935	Benjamin’s son
Catherine Hayes	1875	1942	Edward’s wife

Clark Family

Person	Birth Year	Death Year	Notes
Charles Clark	1830	1905	Store owner
Emma Clark	1833	1908	Wife of Charles
Frank Clark	1855	1940	Son, inherited store
Lucy Clark	1857	1932	Daughter
Henry Clark	1880	1955	Frank’s son
Rose Clark	1882	1960	Frank’s wife
Hannah …	?	?	Frank’s first wife?

Wilson Family

Person	Birth Year	Death Year	Notes
George Wilson	1822	1890	Farmer
Martha Wilson	1825	1893	Wife of George
Joseph Wilson	1848	1915	Son, farmer
Mary Wilson	1850	1928	Daughter
Peter Wilson	1875	1940	Joseph’s son
Anna Wilson	1878	1945	Joseph’s wife
Charles Clark and Mary Wilson			Joint headstone?

Some code to get you started

If you choose to try this exercise using Python, see if you can work out how to repurpose the code notebook we used to explore ORBIS on your data. If you want to try using R code instead, here’s some starter code.