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.

For Oct 7, our speaker will be Cindarella Petz, research associate in the field of Digital Humanities at the Professorship of Computational Social Science and Big Data at the TUM School of Governance. Cindarella’s research focuses on Computational History at the interface of Historical Studies and Computer Science. She is particularly interested in how to fruitfully integrate interdisciplinary Computational Methods in the Humanities. Currently, she is working on the application of Historical Network Research on the History of Political Extremism, as well as on Intellectual History.

We hope to welcome you online on Oct 7! Meanwhile, if you have any questions please contact us at events@historicalnetworkresearch.org.

Best wishes,

Aline Deicke and Ingeborg van Vugt

Network models and configurations for conviction

In the case study* presented in this talk, we evaluate the extend of political judiciary during the Corporate State of Austria based on a dataset of over 1,800 court cases tried at the provincial courts of Vienna I and II in 1935. This dataset was originally curated in the process of a project on political repression by the University of Vienna (Wenniger/Mesner/Ardelt 2015–17).

We propose to model these court trials as networks, thus utilizing networks as epistemic tools for structural analysis.

We show how a quantitative-based approach combined with a qualitative evaluation and contextualisation can further historical insights on the judicial practice and structural forms of political judiciary in these courts. Additionally, we point out to chances and pitfalls of the proposed mixed methods approach to provide a critical perspective to modeling big data in digital legal history, and address limitations of working with judicial records.

*Based on our paper: Petz, Cindarella & Pfeffer, Jürgen (2021). Configuration to Conviction. Network Structures of Political Judiciary in the Austrian Corporate State. Social Networks, vol. 66, July 2021, pp. 185–201. DOI= 10.1016/j.socnet.2021.03.001.