Building on the experience gathered during our international workshop held on June 22, 2023 entitled Social Networks in Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Thirty Years after “Robust Action”, I have been working on a scientific article. Its tentative title, similar to the one of the workshop, was inspired by John F. Padgett’s and Christopher K. Ansell’s study, the Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434 which appeared in 1993. The purpose of the article is to clarify some of the basic concepts and trends in the development of historical social network analysis during the past thirty years. It focuses specifically on social network research applied in medieval and early Renaissance studies and intends to define what Big data means in this context. By employing four ongoing digital humanities projects as case studies, the paper investigates broader questions such as the applicability of the method to a heterogeneous set of historical big data. The article concludes with some final remarks addressing the future of the study of social networks in the field.
The reasons for both the article and the conference are embedded in one of the main goals of the RELEVEN project, which is to visualize and model the network structures of the short eleventh century. One of the major methodological challenges of the project is to create a data model that can meet the general requirements of big data, i.e. large in volume and great in variety. By exchanging ideas and experiences with other colleagues and research teams working in the field, these challenges can be significantly reduced.
The first project described in the article is led by Christina Lutter at University of Vienna, which began in October 2020. Entitled „Soziale Netzwerke im spätmittelalterlichen Wien. Geschlecht, Verwandtschaft und Objektkultur”, the main focus of their research are questions of urban identity and the formation of urban communities. For this purpose, they primarily employ two sets of archival material; the inventory of medieval charters and the so-called Stadtbücher, 1395-1430 from Vienna. Here, the common point with the Releven project is one of the themes, i.e. the evolution of civic identity and its manifestation in the source material.
The second project presented in the article, entitled The Ruling in hard times. Patterns of power and practices of government in the making of Carolingian Italy project started in 2020 under the guidance of Giuseppe Albertoni and involved three other research units led by Stefano Gasparri, Gianmarco De Angelis, and Fabrizio Oppesidano. The restricted time frame with which the project is concerned coincides with Lothar I’s reign (822-850) in Carolingian Italy and coupled with a more extended geographical area, including North and Central Italy. The documentary basis of their dataset is rather heterogeneous in nature, ranging from narrative sources to manuscript collections preserved in and beyond Italy. This peculiarity of the project is very similar to one of the challenges of RELEVEN, which is to create a dataset from a heterogeneous set of sources that allows for "greatness in diversity". At the same time, it is centered on specific themes, such as the question of identity. The Ruling in Hard Times team has also addressed this issue in various publications, focusing specifically on the period immediately preceding the one covered by the RELEVEN project.
The third project DISSINET Dissident Networks Project, led by David Zbíral, has a much broader geographical focus. By studying specific areas, such as Languedoc, Lombardy, Tuscany, the German-speaking lands and England, the team intends to address the question of dissident culture(s) on a European scale. Their primary source material comprises published inquisitorial records produced in Languedoc between the 1230s and the 1320s, in Tuscany between the 1240s and 1300s, in the German-speaking lands between the 1390s and the 1430s, in 15th-16th-century England, as well in Dauphiné, Piedmont, and Provence between the 1460s-1550s. The common ground between the RELEVEN and the DISSINET projects is their broad geographical focus. This is particularly important for creating a diverse dataset, but it also makes it more challenging to collect high throughput data.
The fourth project presented in the article is which points beyond Europe with its dataset. The research team is ready to analyze the short eleventh century in a global context, by confronting Eastern and Western sources, scholarly literature, and historical debates. Like the project about medieval Vienna, RELEVEN also employs both written and visual sources for that purpose, originating predominantly from four macro areas: Armenia, Byzantium, the Italian Peninsula, and Central Europe, more specifically the Kingdom of Hungary and the Margraviate of Austria. However, what generally distinguishes the RELEVEN project from the other three is its geographical coverage, which in this context can be described as global.
These four projects have been selected for the analysis of the heterogeneity of historical periods they address, and the different geographical levels they study. The latter include urban, macro regional, European, and global scales. The time frame of these projects ranges between the beginning of the ninth and the end of the fifteenth centuries. All of them adapt, at least in part, a prosopographical approach. In the article, I provide a short overview of these projects which is followed by a description of their source material used for their databases. The article also describes their methodological approaches, including the data selection process and the main historical questions they raise. Finally, by comparing their datasets to other similar data collections, the article addresses the question under what conditions their data fulfill the general requirements for Big data.
The ca. 15.000-word article is supplemented by an Appendix, which includes works applying network theory to medieval and early Renaissance historical data, starting from Richard M. Smith Kin and Neighbors in a Thirteenth-Century Suffolk Community pioneer article appeared in 1979, up to 2023. Here the medieval and early Renaissance period is considered between 476 and ca. 1450. The list is primarily based on the bibliography provided by the Historicalnetworkresearch.org and targets those studies which apply network theory to medieval and early Renaissance data by block models, graphs or other models related to graph theory. Both social and semantic networks are considered. The list includes only published scientific articles, book chapters, and monographs. Unpublished working papers, databases, and Ph.D. theses are not part of the selection.
The Appendix shows that until recently, American and German-speaking academia having been at the forefront in the study of medieval and early Renaissance networks through social network analysis. At present, there have been six monograph-length contributions, statistics which may also indicate the still exploratory nature of the method in the given field. For this reason, one of RELEVEN’s missions is to make an impact on the study of medieval social networks as well.
However, there are also cases in which the available data does not fully or partially meet the requirements for big data. In these cases, a semantic network analysis could be particularly illuminating. At the top right corner of the post, you will find an example to this method; the network visualization of selected key words appearing in the registers of the Florentine consultatory councils, the Consulte e Pratiche, written down by the humanist Coluccio di Piero Salutati, between 1376 and 1378.
