Social Network Analysis of the League of Nations' Intellectual Cooperation, an Historical Distant Reading

Founded in 1922 by the League of Nations on the observation that the pacification of Europe may pass through a better collaboration between scientific elites, the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) is responsible for coordinating the restructuration of knowledge circulation. Bringing together leading researchers at the height of their career, as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie or George Hale, chaired by Henri Bergson, the Committee weaves a complex network between transnational scientific institutions and societies, congresses and individuals (Pernet 2014). This paper proposes an analysis of the work and functioning of the organization between 1919 and 1927 by setting up a database containing metadata of thousands of documents contained in the ICIC funds (United Nations Archives, Geneva). Visualized as a network of 3.200 people (tens of thousands of relationships), this work provides a new understanding of the internal organization of the Intellectual Cooperation, as well as completely new insights about its relations with the rest of the scientific and diplomatic world. In particular, we will show the necessity to compare the "micro" structure of relationships as mapped by the archive with the "macro" formal structure of the institution: does the thousands of documents, in a distant reading approach (Moretti 2013), confirm the internal organization of the League of Nations or do they show individuals/communities that bypass the official hierarchy

Introduction à la visualisation de données: l'analyse de réseau en histoire

The use of data visualization in history leads to contradictory reactions: some are fascinated by its heuristic potential and forget their critical faculties while others reject this practice, suspecting it of hiding explanatory weaknesses. This paper proposes a distinction between demonstration visualization and research visualization, reminding that scholars should not only use data visualization for communication purposes, but also for the research itself. It is particularly in its more complex form that this research visualization category will be approached here: network analysis

GEPHI: Introduction to Network Analysis and Visualisation

Network Analysis and visualization appears to be an interesting tool to give the researcher the ability to see its data from a new angle. Because Gephi is an easy access and powerful network analysis tool, we propose a tutorial designed to allow everyone to make his first experiments on two complementary datasets. After a short introduction about the basis of SNA and some examples which shows the potential of this tool and gives some inspiration, this tutorial is divided into 2 main "exercices": a geographical network of 1000 individuals sending letters all over Europe and a 2-mode network of 100 members of 10 different institutions

A Social Network Analysis of Twitter: Mapping the Digital Humanities Community

Defining digital humanities might be an endless debate if we stick to the discussion about the boundaries of this concept as an academic "discipline". In an attempt to concretely identify this field and its actors, this paper shows that it is possible to analyse them through Twitter, a social media widely used by this "community of practice". Based on a network analysis of 2,500 users identified as members of this movement, the visualisation of the "who's following who?" graph allows us to highlight the structure of the network's relationships, and identify users whose position is particular. Specifically, we show that linguistic groups are key factors to explain clustering within a network whose characteristics look similar to a small world

La connaissance est un réseau: perspective sur l'organisation archivistique et encyclopédique

L'analyse de réseau ne transforme pas nos objets d'étude, elle transforme le regard que le chercheur porte sur ceux-ci. Organisée en réseau, l'information devient relationnelle. Elle rend possible en puissance la création d'une nouvelle connaissance, à l'image d'une encyclopédie dont les liens entre les notices tissent une toile dont on peut analyser les caractéristiques structurelles ou d'un répertoire d'archives qui voit sa hiérarchie bouleversée par un index qui recompose le réseau d'échange d'information à l'intérieur d'un groupe de personnes. Sur la base de deux exemples d'outils de gestion, conservation et valorisation de la connaissance, l'encyclopédie en ligne Wikipédia et les archives de la coopération intellectuelle de la Société des Nations, cet article questionne le rapport entre le chercheur et son objet compris dans sa globalité

Archives Distant Reading: Mapping the Activity of the League of Nations' Intellectual Cooperation

Founded in 1922 by the League of Nations upon observation that the pacification of Europe may benefit from a better collaboration between scientific elites, the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) is responsible for coordinating the restructuration of knowledge circulation. Bringing together leading researchers at the height of their career, such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and George Hale, chaired by Henri Bergson, the Committee weaves a complex network between transnational scientific institutions and societies, congresses and individuals (Pernet, 2014). This paper proposes an analysis of the work and functioning of the organization between 1919 and 1927 by setting up a database containing metadata of thousands of documents contained by the ICIC funds (United Nations Archives, Geneva). Visualized as a network of 3.200 people (tens of thousands of relationships), this work provides a new understanding of the internal organization of the Intellectual Cooperation, as well as completely new insights about its relations with the rest of the scientific and diplomatic world. In particular, we will show the necessity to compare the "micro" structure of relationships as mapped by the archive with the "macro" formal structure of the institution. Do the thousands of documents, in a distant reading approach (Moretti, 2013), confirm the internal organization of the League of Nations or do they show individuals/communities that bypass the official hierarchy? As an opening to an epistemological debate, this research questions the relationship between the researcher, the database and its sources: are the metadata of an archive corpus usable information, regardless of their unique qualitative content? More technically, it also addresses the issue of data visualization and modeling in the historical sciences

Towards the Formalization of Metadata Network Analysis in History: a Complex and Multidimensional Case Study

International audienceThis contribution focuses on understanding the structuration of scientific and cultural coordination in the inter-war period, based on the archives of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) of the League of Nations. This case study allows the establishment of a plurimethodological reflection on the contribution of network analysis in the humanities in general. This perspective, which consist in developing a quantitative and structural analysis jointly mobilizing mathematical theories, computer sciences and archival questioning, is also a way of questioning the relationship between historical research and digital technologies. Without however making these technical developments an end in itself, the contribution of such methods of social network analysis and visualization makes it possible to multiply the perspectives, to play with the scales and to allow the navigation between a global overview of the structure (here, an international organization) and an approach closer to the individuals

A Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of Multilayer Networks in the Humanities

If network analysis has made its way into the humanities toolbox, and especially in history (Düring et al. 2016), it is because it helps to grasp the complexity of the objects of these disciplines. However, to understand the multidimensionality of the data requires a consequent reflection on its modeling. This paper seeks to be part of a series of publications aimed at making advanced network analysis concepts more accessible to the humanities scholars: from ontological questions (Langmead et al. 2016) to the necessary discussion of the integration of temporality in graphs (Lemercier 2015; Conroy et al. 2019), the development of typologies of uses (Grandjean 2017a) or attempts to provide aids to interpretation (Grandjean & Jacomy 2019). The question of multilayer networks becomes especially more and more important, whether in a general way (McGee et al. 2016) or applied to the humanities (eg. Vugt 2017; Grandjean 2017b). Our purpose is to discuss a unifying conceptual framework allowing the transition between a current formal multilayer model (Kivelä et al. 2014; Knudsen et al. 2019) and the language of the humanities. This framework is expressed by a visual representation that contains a multiplicity of layers that synthesizes and clarifies the different possible networks and facilitate the appropriation of the model by researchers