Marten Düring
Marten Düring (University of Luxembourg )
Marten Düring holds a PhD in contemporary history and enjoys working in interdisciplinary environments. A lot of his work has to do with memory, network analysis and text analysis. Previously he held positions as PhD student, Postdoc and Researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen, the universities of Mainz, Nijmegen, Chapel Hill and the CVCE Luxembourg. Marten coordinates the C2DH-based team of the impresso project (with EPFL DHLAB and ICL Uni Zurich) and is part of the consortium of the ANR/FNR-funded project BLIZAAR (Hybrid Visualization of Dynamic Multilayer Graphs) together with partners from LIST Luxembourg, LaBRI (Bordeaux) and EISTI (Pau/Paris). Marten is also responsible for the website Historical Network Research and co-editor of the Journal of Historical Network Research.
Advances in the study of historical networks
Historians have a long-standing fascination with networks. In most cases it is expressed with the metaphorical usage of the term itself as well as related terms like “entangled”, “linked” or “tied up” just to name a few. The rise of Social Network Analysis (SNA) as theory and method over the last decades got historians interested in network analysis but also triggered interest in historical data from other disciplines. A rich body of work emerged where methods from the (social) sciences and historical research questions overlapped. Within and around the field of Digital Humanities (DH) a new conception of networks emerged: No longer tied to the representation and analysis of models of social interaction, (interactive) network visualizations became popular as data representation and exploration technique. In this talk I will discuss to which extent SNA and DH perspectives on networks serve the needs of historians and ask which hitherto unresolved challenges the historical network thinking poses for the network-related disciplines.