Using Dynamic Hypergraphs to Reveal the Evolution of the Business Network of a 17th Century French Woman Merchant

Many digital humanity use cases require the analysis of relationships between entities (e.g. people or countries). The analysis of those relationships is particularly difficult when these relations change over time. A common representations of such relations is through graphs, which connect pairs of entities. However, in the real world relationships are often more complex and can be better described using hypergraphs (where edges can connect more than two entities). In this paper, we present a digital humanity case study of the analysis of people mentioned in 16th and 17th Century legal documents, modeled as a dynamic hypergraph. We use a new representation called Parallel Aggregated Ordered Hypergraph. Our prototype implementation of Parallel Aggregated Ordered Hypergraph, and the benefits of the PAOH representation are discussed.