Let us resume our dive into the history of historical network research! In this three-part series post, I first recounted the history of computational thought in historical research, and next I will discuss networks for history, before highlighting some of the cornerstones of network methodologies in historical studies. This second post builds upon the long history of computational thought and computation-based methods in the historical studies part 1 of this series , before I tackle networks in historical research in part 3.
The ready availability of computers and increasing capabilities of computing since the s did not only influence the rise of quantitative history, as we have seen in part 1 of this series , but also that of network research. The key breakthrough in the formalization of social network research was to describe these social networks and their mechanisms mathematically in the s. The historiography of network research commonly associates the inauguration of network research with the studies on sociometry by Jakob L.
Moreno and Hellen H. Jennings in the s. However, the origins of depicting social relationships in networks and matrices are continuously traced back further to, e. The origins of studying social relationships in networks, however, are closely related to the evolvement of the field of sociology: studying how people form social relationships, groups, and societies.
In the s, a new network research center formed in Harvard around Harrison White of a relational sociology perspective, which led to a renewed interest in network research; as well as by the group surrounding Linton Freeman at UC Irvine California and the group by Edward Lauman and James Coleman at the University of California.
Further developments of formalized network methodologies and their implementations in case studies have since resulted in an increasingly unmanageable amount of publications since the late s: for example, on exponential random graph modeling Lusher et al. Network terminology and methodology are increasingly adopted in other disciplines, such as history.
