How much subjectivity does network analysis and visualization entail? Mathieu Jacomy and Martin Grandjean, two SSH scholars and network aficionados, have analyzed the same network separately. Mathieu only knows the strict minimum about this network, and makes his analysis in the blind. Martin, on the contrary, is the absolute expert of the data represented: co-occurrences between 3.200 agents in the documents of the League of Nations between 1919 and 1927. Mathieu and Martin will present their respective interpretations, then discuss what Mathieu has missed, and why. We expect this live performance to show that there is a stable ground to network analysis, but also that expert knowledge is essential to interpreting networks.

Bio

Mathieu Jacomy is Doctor of Techno-Anthropology and post-doc at the Aalborg University TANT Lab. He was a research engineer for 10 years at the Sciences Po médialab in Paris, and is a co-founder of Gephi, a popular network visualization tool. He develops digital instruments involving data visualization and network analysis for the social science and humanities. His current research focuses on visual network analysis, digital methods and issue mapping. He contributes to developing the web crawler Hyphe, the online network sharing platform MiniVan, and Gephi. He tweets at @jacomyma and blogs at reticular.hypotheses.org.

Martin Grandjean is a Junior Lecturer in Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Lausanne (UNIL profile) and a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at EPFL (EPFL profile). His research focuses on the development of network analysis and visualization methods in history, particularly applied to the study of international organizations. His teaching focuses on the use of digital tools in history, such as visualization of statistical data or analysis of large corpora of digitized press or archival metadata.

He is the spokesman of Humanistica, the French-speaking Digital Humanities Association and is on the board of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). His recent publications includes works on network analysis in history, on the Digital Humanities community on Twitter, on the use of social media to disseminate historical contents or on the networks of scientific exchanges in the interwar period (thesis available online).