Week Six Reflection
Working on the Historical Network Research Methodology paper was a very interesting rabbit hole to explore. It's a little harrowing and little fun whenever I realize how little I actually know about a certain subject I've already spoken on. Harrowing for the obvious (and silly) fears that you may have embarrassed yourself in front of peers and fun because it feels like a whole new wing in the museum just opened up for you. It was only after sharing the first draft for how we might approach creating an occupational taxonomy for the figures in the EBA diary that I really started digging into the history and theory behind social network analysis (SNA) and historical network research (HNR).
That said, after I sifted through many sources and learned the basic concepts of the three approaches to SNA (Fleck's thought collective, Latour's Actor-Network Theory and Livingstone's geography of knowledge) I didn't find that I needed to completely reassemble my first draft concept. The principle difference between the two drafts was in the definition of occupation. In the first, I was following "the principal business of one's life," which involved determining where the figure drew the bulk of their income. I feel this idea has merits by preserving integrity within the fields, but practically and logistically speaking, making this determination for all of the figures is labor intensive and is vulnerable to at least some amount of inconsistent guesswork. Instead, I decided to opt for "an activity in which one engages" for occupation, whereby the figure is included for all of the categories that they are associated with, sans weights or qualifiers.
Another element I wound up pivoting away from was the concept of including female figures in the fields of their partners. After a good deal of research, I wasn't able to find much of anything on this complicated question (although somewhat related to Gail M. McGuire's concept of shadow structures in contemporary corporate workplaces in Gender, Race, and the Shadow Structure: A Study of Informal Networks and Inequality
in a Work Organization). What ultimately made me change course on this was the actual text itself. After putting all volumes of the diary in Voyant and running the context tool, I simply didn't find enough examples of the female figures in the diary acting as hosts and social intermediaries to support this concept.
Sarah Ketchley suggested that these relationships may not be evident in the text due to redundancy. If the entries are being made from their ship, it is implicit that Emma B. Andrews would have hosted all of the interactions on board and she likely didn't need to remind herself of that. With this in mind, we might be able to more accurately track these social intermediary relationships by noting the boat and location tags in network visualizations in order to more accurately follow these connections.
Over the course of the reading I did find some funny similarities between SNA and text mining. Both approaches seemed to flourish as soon as technology reached a nexus of speed and affordability, and as soon as it became available, it seemed to saturate the academic landscape. I can hear the exasperation in writer's voices when they describe how anything and everything was being jammed into a word cloud or an SNA visualization, as previously dusty and bookish fields grasped for exciting visual material, regardless of whether they made any sense. It's the perennial challenge of every technological breakthrough; resisting visual shock and awe in deference to utility.
Reading:
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