Dear all,
The Historical Network Research community is pleased to announce another event in the HNR Lunch Lectures Series. From January 2021 onwards, monthly online lectures will shed a spotlight on recent research and ideas from the field of historical network analysis to promote discussion among the HNR community.
We started on January 21st with a lecture by Demival Vasques Filho on “Extracting large-scale network data from archives“. This lecture was followed by a presentation by Henrike Rudolph on “(Re)Constructing Historical Narratives from Collective Biographies”. You can find the videos from these lectures on the HNR YouTube-channel.
The next lecture will be on Thursday March 18th. Our speaker will be Diane Harris Cline, associate professor of history at the George Washington University. She will present her talk entitled “People, Places, and Things in Contexts: Field Maps and the Ancient Greeks at Sea” (abstract below). Prof. Cline was kind enough to share her article on the topic to read in advance. You can find the article here.
Because of the time difference, we decided to turn our lunchlecture into an afternoon tea lecture. The seminar will start at 4:00 pm CET (10 am EST / 3 pm GMT) and finish one hour later.
If you would like to participate, please register on Eventbrite. It is possible to register for individual lectures as well as for the whole lecture series. If you have already registered for one of our previous lunch seminars and specified that you want to attend the whole series, then there is no need to register for this event. You will receive a Zoom link by email prior to the lunch lecture.
We look forward to seeing you online!
Best wishes,
Aline Deicke (Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz)
Ingeborg van Vugt (Utrecht University)
People, Places, and Things in Contexts: Field Maps and the Ancient Greeks at Sea
The topic for discussion is the introduction of ‘field maps’, which combine sociograms with an interpretive layer of fields (e.g. economic, social, technological, infrastructure, religious) to analyse the ways humans and things are entangled. ‘Field map’ is a term which I have coined for this kind of data visualization. These fields are layered over the sociogram to show the larger chains of interactions that tie people, their activities, places, and non-human things in the social puzzle. To demonstrate the application of field maps, we will use as a case study the ties between olive oil, wine, and the sea for the ancient Greeks, and in this way we can model the entanglement inside the complex systems of an ancient Greek merchant ship in its contexts at sea and in ports. Using this adaptation of sociograms, we explore the role of material things in maintaining social relations, inspired by materiality studies, entanglement, Actor-Network Theory, sensory experience studies, and social network analysis.
