A Conceptual Framework for Multilayer Historical Networks

The technicality of network visualization applied to history and its relative novelty often result in a superficial use of a software, limited to describing a situation immediately extracted from a data set. This approach is justified in the exploratory phase of an analysis in most cases where the network is very explicitly present in the object studied. But the complexity of the entanglement of historical actors, places, institutions or temporal sequences makes finer modeling necessary if we want to go beyond a simplistic "datafication". To encourage curiosity towards other modes of analysis and put the data modeling (and therefore the historical sources) at the center of the research process, this article proposes a short introduction on how to discuss what makes a specific historical network, its components, its relationships, its layers and its different facets. It offers a kind of visual guide to help historians follow a multilayer framework to think their research object from another (multidimensional) angle and to combine them.