Culture Analytics is a collaborative, translational data science that explores culture and cultural interaction as a multi-scale / multi-resolution phenomenon. The macroscopic view, that allows a researcher to move from the microscale of close reading, up through the mesoscales, and on to the macroscale of distant reading, is a hallmark of the field.
Following the 2019 workshop which focused on the use of time series as a way to understand and visualize humanities data, the 2020 workshop is dedicated to how network exploration and analysis can be similarly used to understand and visualize. The questions that focus the workshop are: How can network visualisations provide a distant viewing of data? What are the different steps to build a network? How to read it?
Similar to 2019, the workshop will begin with an introduction to culture analytics and network analysis offered as a framework for the rest of the workshop. Afterwards, there will be two brief presentations of of research examples, one involving a small dataset and another one with big data. This will be followed by a hands-on tutorial with Gephi that will introduce participants to the basics of network exploration and analysis. Gephi is a popular network visualization and analysis tool. It helps scholars investigate empirical phenomena that can be seen as nodes and links, entities and relations. Drawing from graph theory and information design, it helps shifting the focus from the entities to their relations. It repurposes computational metrics to describe and characterize the topology of empirical networks.