| Abstrakt: |
Information systems structure our access to the past. Understanding them is vital if we are to appreciate how they shape and bias the histories that we tell. However, as more and more of our archival collections move online, grasping the intricacies of the digital archive, its analog form, and its historical antecedents becomes ever more challenging. This special issue proposes network analysis as a valuable methodological and intellectual framework through which we can navigate and analyze the historical archive, including six new studies that show the research enabled by these methods by virtue of the way that networks foreground latent connections between entities such as documents, texts, people, and places. In this introduction, we adumbrate the multiplicity of ways in which early modern source material can be represented and analyzed using network analysis, and also proffer a set of shared values, methods, and opportunities that informs the development of this research field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
