Dear all,

This is a gentle reminder for our upcoming Historical Network Research lunch lecture on Thursday April 15.

Our speaker will be Ramona Roller, a doctoral student at the Chair of Systems Design at ETH Zurich. She will present her talk entitled “modeling time in letter correspondence networks of the European Reformation: beyond snapshots towards temporal paths” (see abstract below). 

The seminar will start at 12:00 pm CET and ends one hour later. If you would like to participate, please register via Eventbrite. 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. 

Modeling time in letter correspondence networks of the European Reformation: beyond snapshots towards temporal paths

Interactions between individuals are inherently temporal. For example, letters are sent and received at a specific date. Despite this temporality, we commonly model interactions with aggregated networks where temporal relations are ignored. As a consequence, interactions at a later point in time can affect those at an earlier point: chronology is broken leading to flawed network statistics, such as centrality measures. I will address this problem by using network models that are based on paths of interactions rather than on classic interaction dyads. By applying these paths to a letter correspondence network of European reformers from the 16th century, I show that central reformers become less important when accounting for time and the spread of ideas gets restricted to specific routes.