The Historical Network Research community is pleased to announce another event in the HNR Lunch Lectures Series. The next lecture will be by Ramona Roller, a doctoral student at the Chair of Systems Design at ETH Zurich. For more information, visit the HNR website.

The seminar will start at 12:00 pm CET and ends one hour later.

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.