Abstract

We provide a detailed case study showing how social network analysis allows scholars to detect an event affecting the entire historical network under consideration and identify the responsible actors. We study the middle 13th century in Czech lands, where a rigid political structure of noble families surrounding the monarchs led to the uprising of part of the nobility. Having collected data on approximately 2,400 noblemen from 576 charters, we attempted to uncover social network features pointing to the rebellion and expose the noblemen who joined it. We observed, among other such quantifiable features, assortativity increasing before and resetting to random after the rebellion, a drop in the number of stable connections and subgraph similarity between yearly networks and regional titles (burgraves) rising in centrality above royal court officials in that period. The presented methods can be directly translated to other person-document data of comparable or larger sizes, and we hope it can help detect or disambiguate the timing of similar major events and the roles of people involved in them.

摘要

我们提供了一个详细的案例研究，展示了社交网络分析如何让学者们发现一个影响整个历史网络的事件并确定责任人。我们研究 13 世纪中叶的捷克土地，那里围绕着君主的贵族家庭僵化的政治结构导致了部分贵族的起义。在从 576 个宪章中收集了大约 2,400 名贵族的数据后，我们试图发现指向叛乱的社交网络特征，并揭露加入叛乱的贵族。我们观察到，在其他此类可量化特征中，分类性在叛乱之前增加并在叛乱之后重置为随机，年度网络和地区头衔 (burgraves) 之间的稳定连接数量和子图相似性下降，在那个时期的中心地位高于皇家法院官员。所提出的方法可以直接转化为具有可比性或更大规模的其他个人文档数据，我们希望它可以帮助检测或消除类似重大事件的时间以及相关人员的角色的歧义。