Network Visualizations | Resources for Digital Humanities virtual instruction

When we see things differently, we can ask different questions. Digital Humanities tools offer new ways of seeing texts, images, and data sets, thus offering new ways to explore, examine, and teach them.

Tools:

Gephi: free and open-source leading software for making all kinds of graphs and networks.
Onodo: a free tool for creating interactive network visualizations (presented below)
Textexture: visualize a text as a network
See the full list of DH@SDSU curated tools here

Resources:

Step-by-step guide to Onodo in Google doc (by Pam Lach)
Onodo tutorial created by Fabrizio Lacarra Ramirez, DH Center Student Assistant, Spring 2021.
New in Spring 2022: Spanish-language Onodo tutorial, created by Fabrizio Lacarra Ramirez, DH Center Specialist.

Examples of Student Projects:

Students from Professor Beth Pollard’s HIST 400 (Spring 2017) used Onodo for a variety of purposes and projects that visualized social and historical networks:

Annie Farrington used the network analysis program Onodo to demonstrate the inter-relationship of scholars’ arguments about the role of ergotism in the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692. Click to see the interactive visualization

Jade Connolly-Cepurac undertook a network analysis via Onodo to investigate the complex relationship between the scholarship debating the identity of the enslaved Tituba (at the center of the witchcraft crisis in 1692 Salem) and the pop culture representations of Tituba from the mid-20th century through today. Click to see the interactive visualization

Haylee Savoie used Onodo to analyze scholars’ arguments about the role of Puritanism in witchcraft accusations of late seventeenth century New England. Click to see the interactive visualization

Readings:

Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, and Trees (Verso 2007):
In this groundbreaking book, Franco Moretti argues that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. In place of the traditionally selective literary canon of a few hundred texts, Moretti offers charts, maps and time lines, developing the idea of “distant reading” into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, in which the canon disappears into the larger literary system.

Franco Moretti, Distant Reading(Verso, 2013): How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his positions.

Kathryn Schulz, “What is Distant Reading?” (The New York Times, 2011)

Faculty point of contact:

Elizabeth Pollard (History). epollard@sdsu.edu
Pam Lach (DH Librarian). plach@sdsu.edu