ZBÍRAL, David, Tomáš HAMPEJS and Jan KRÁL. Assessing the Validity of Social Network Graphs Constructed from Name Co-Occurrence : The Example of Medieval Inquisitorial Records. In Fourth European Conference on Social Networks, 9. - 12.9. 2019, Zürich. 2019.
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Basic information
Original name Assessing the Validity of Social Network Graphs Constructed from Name Co-Occurrence : The Example of Medieval Inquisitorial Records
Authors ZBÍRAL, David (203 Czech Republic, guarantor, belonging to the institution), Tomáš HAMPEJS (203 Czech Republic, belonging to the institution) and Jan KRÁL (203 Czech Republic, belonging to the institution).
Edition Fourth European Conference on Social Networks, 9. - 12.9. 2019, Zürich, 2019.
Other information
Original language English
Type of outcome Presentations at conferences
Field of Study 60304 Religious studies
Country of publisher Switzerland
Confidentiality degree is not subject to a state or trade secret
WWW URL
RIV identification code RIV/00216224:14210/19:00107724
Organization unit Faculty of Arts
Keywords in English medieval heresy; social network analysis; network extraction from texts
Tags rivok
Tags International impact, Reviewed
Changed by Changed by: doc. PhDr. David Zbíral, Ph.D., učo 52251. Changed: 23/5/2024 21:48.
Abstract
The growing interest in the formal methods of network analysis in historical research has brought into focus older printed resources containing structured data, such as catalogues (of artifacts, inscriptions, manuscripts, etc.), dictionaries (biographical and other), gazetteers, various structured lists, etc. One such type of resource, widely represented in the history of religions as a field, is indices of personal names contained in editions of sources, which may serve for constructing social networks on the basis of the co-occurrence of names in a textual unit (page, manuscript folio, paragraph, etc.). This paper will focus on selected medieval inquisitorial registers as a test case for quantifying the validity of this method through the comparison of networks validated by manual coding with those created automatically on the basis of name co-occurrence. The aim is to show that this seemingly rather rough method can produce comparatively valid outputs if used with discernment and in an iterative way, where the exploration of the outputs helps to fine-tune the initial index of persons and the process of network construction. Another point will be that the validity also depends largely on the kind of research question such an automatically constructed network is used to answer. Finally, the paper will demonstrate that empirical comparison between the outcomes of the manual and the automated approaches is not always in favour of the manual one, as we might expect; in fact, the automated procedure allows some errors typical of human coders to be avoided.
Links
GX19-26975X, research and development projectName: Nekonformní náboženské kultury ve středověké Evropě z pohledu analýzy sociálních sítí a geografických informačních systémů (Acronym: DISSINET)
Investor: Czech Science Foundation
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