In Networking the Humanities (UNIV 200), we used social network theory and analysis to better understand the connections between certain places, people, and organizations in spy networks during the Vietnam War and the development of personal computers in Palo Alto in the 60s and 70s.
To understand the connections that led to the birth of the personal computer, our class used John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (2005). As we read the book, we recorded the various connections and relationships of individuals to other individuals, organizations, schools, places, and informal networks. We inserted our collected data into the social network tool Gephi.
This class was very valuable to me and my DH career because it introduced me to data visualization tools that are not necessarily spatial in nature. Tools like Gephi help me digest vast amounts of data and make patterns more visible and apparent.