Social network visualisation of artworks, workshops, and punches.

Vanja Macovaz , Università degli Studi di Firenze

The study of punched decoration in Medieval panel paintings, while having to deal with the problem of interpreting the collected data, was the main interest of the work of Norwegian art conservator Erling Sigvard Skaug (1938-2022) and several other important art historians during the second half of the 20th century. The archives of the Norwegian art historian and conservator were the object of the doctoral project carried out during a three-year period from 2019 to 2022 at the University of Florence by Ph.D. candidate Vanja Macovaz under the guidance of Professor Stella Sonia Chiodo. The scholarship in Digital Humanities involved the creation of a digital archive, where people could access study material, texts and tables, that highlights the links between workshops and works of art, which were shaped by the use of different forms of punch decoration. Using the author’s photographic archives, which can be accessed at Villa I Tatti in Florence where they are kept, it was possible to digitize and make available online all the important images that were at the base of Skaug’s forty-year research work as well as to create connections between them and the research published in the volumes “Punch Marks from Giotto to Fra Angelico: Attribution, Chronology, and Workshop Relationships in Tuscan Panel Painting” in 1994.

The nodegoat platform was used during this research work to obtain a graphic and interactive view of the data collected, allowing users to see the links between workshops and the punches they used, the contacts, the loans and exchanges of tools and how the latter were used to realize the works of art that have been studied in this project.

Project Website: Punch Marks database
Public User Interface: nodegoat.net/viewer.p/100

Social network visualisation of workshops and punches.

Geographical visualisation of the catchment areas of 7 Italian colleges.

Ilaria Maggiulli, Università di Bologna

The second half of the sixteenth century, following the Council of Trent, saw a growth in educational institutions. Various religious orders assumed the task of providing the youth with an education and, of course, the Jesuits proved the most successful. Among these new institutions, Colleges for Nobles were designed to train students enjoying a privileged social status, and prepare them to hold top positions in society, civil or ecclesiastical. These “seminaria nobilium” represented an educational option that more often than not was an alternative to university, particularly for the elder sons, who were expected to fill the ranks of the governing class and perpetuate the family lineage.

The database “Noble boarders in Early Modern Italy”, born out of a collaboration with the ASFE project dedicated to Italian universities’ students, aims at “filling the gaps” in the ASFE database. It currently collects the names of more than 15.000 boarders in 7 Italian “collegi per nobili” – Jesuits (Parma, Bologna, Ravenna, Siena) and not (Collegio Clementino in Rome, Collegio San Carlo in Modena, Accademia degli Ardenti in Bologna) – taken from printed and archival sources. Further information about these boarders (dates of birth/death, degree, career, portrait) are briefly mentioned, when known.

nodegoat offered me the opportunity to import my “old” database and improve it by providing different, appealing visualisations (geographical, social and chronological). Furthermore, it allows me to constantly add, correct or improve data.

Public User Interface: nodegoat.net/viewer.p/99

Social network visualisation of noblemen who visited more than one college.

Geographical visualisation of the letters.

Sven Ködel, DHI Paris

Between 1806 and 1812, the French Ministry of the Interior conducted a large-scale survey by correspondence of the languages and dialects spoken in the Napoleonic Empire. For this purpose, letters were sent from Paris to the regional authorities – mainly prefectures, sub-prefectures, mayors – but also to individuals within the clergy and civil society. These agencies then initiated local networks for gathering the requested information. In total, the network includes over 500 agents who played different roles within the survey.

Visualising this network of correspondence was an obvious idea, but impossible a few years ago during the research for my PhD. With the data on the hold, nodegoat now proofed to offer far more than a simple illustration, by facilitating the interpretation of the data and thus the understanding of the survey with regard to its development over time, its objects and its agents. The chronological visualisation helps to uncover main focuses that structured the survey over the course of its six years. The representation of the total network points the central role of the ministry, on one hand, and the multitude and diversity of the local agents on the other. These latter were particularly important for the success of the survey because, unlike the central administration, they possessed the necessary local and linguistic knowledge. However, they are far less predominant in the surviving handwritten documentation than the agents in the ministry and prefectures, which has affected earlier interpretations and evaluations of the survey as a whole.

Evaluating the network with nodegoat allows an alternative approach to these sources and ultimately a different reading that does more justice to the role of local agents. A complete reconstitution of the local correspondence networks requires research in most of France’s regional archives and is yet far from complete. The visualisation with nodegoat is therefore still work in progress, the possibility to subsequently add, correct or improve data one of nodegoat’s clear advantages.

Public User Interface: nodegoat.net/viewer.p/84

Social network visualisation of the letters, authors, recipients, and topics.

Geographical visualisation of all the movements of the foreign travelers.

Petrus Andrei Gabriel, Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

One of the best known contemporary Romanian historians, Sorin Mitu, stated that small nations often tend to pay a special attention to foreign accounts narrating about their historical reality. On the one hand, because foreign travelers are the fiercest critics of the space they pass through, on the other hand, because these types of accounts shed light on the darkest and most inaccessible corners of society, where historians could hardly reach without the help of those who traveled through or even settled down. Starting from Mitu’s idea, I wanted to research these testimonies from another perspective. Working with traditional means, I found it really difficult and it took me a lot of time to write down all important aspects about travelers and then to group them by professions, education or even route, in order to make any type of analysis. This difficulty was the main reason behind my desire of developing a database which can include various facts about travelers and can be accessible to anyone for further studies. nodegoat suits this goal perfectly. The platform allows researchers to compile large databases and to analyze their data relying on network-type connections.

The main source used by the project are the travel memoirs of foreigners visiting the Romanian Principalities during the 1830s. The objective of the project was to map, by means of nodegoat, a series of variables related to the biographies of the foreign travelers and test the analytical possibilities offered by such approach. I have included information on the geographical space of origin, the university studies, the frequency of short and long-term trips and their purpose, the route, but also the places that made travelers divert from original itinerary. So, I created various easy-readable and modellable graphs (geographical, social and chronological) which show differences and similarities between travelers. Less effort is now needed for complex analyses which could otherwise have taken a long time and the results might have been less accurate than what we are able to present now.

Public User Interface: nodegoat.net/viewer.p/71
Publication: ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=925679

Geographical visualisation of the travel routes of the foreign travelers.

A detailed look at one of my categorised and coded articles using a system of in-text tags.

Lucie Janotová (Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy)

During my PhD research on non-conformist art activism in Socialist Czechoslovakia, I came across a number of self-produced journals that seemed to be the perfect source for studying the nature of the Czechoslovak underground movement. However, as a political sociologist by training, I had only little experience with treating large quantities of analogue material. Because of that, I applied to the Cultures of Dissent in Eastern Europe summer school, hoping to equip myself with some basic knowledge of digital humanities that could hopefully help me treat my data in a more structured way. There I got to know nodegoat, and it has honestly changed my research approach from top to bottom.

For me, nodegoat is not just a visualisations tool, but primarily a personal research space. Because of the flexibility of its features, I was able to customize it exactly to my own needs, while leaving any confusing or unnecessary categorizations behind. Concerning my PhD project, nodegoat enabled me to build from scratch my own dataset of journal articles, full of interactive external links, research notes, and contextual information concerning authorship, topical category, or publication time-scale. Having all this information stored in one place has made my research much more organized and also more complete, because nodegoat is capable of integrating much more information than a simple PDF document or a folder, while keeping all the data clean and organized. Navigating between different objects is also very simple, which allows me to quickly double-check any occurring cross-references or further investigate any possible interactions and relationships.

Because I am working with a grounded theory analysis, I was also happy to find out that I can annotate and analyse full text material directly in nodegoat, which is making my research process even easier. Through a combination of coding categories, in-text tags, and simple visualisations, I am able to perform open-source textual analyses comparable to those provided by licensed software like MAXQDA or Atlas.ti. Moreover, the possibility of conducting social interaction visualisations also helps me quickly explore relationships between categories and possible changes over time, and makes my work-in-progress readily available for public presentations. Finally, if a more complex analysis is needed, nodegoat allows me to export all of my data into a simple CSV or a Word-doc file, which I can further explore through other software. In sum, my whole PhD research is currently stored on this platform, and I am only just starting to fully understand how much potential there is in it.

Filtered visualisation of articles published in 1979 based on their analytical sub-codes.

Preliminary results of queries run in the framework of the project: 'Dynamic Data Ingestion: collecting, linking and providing interoperable research data'.

After a successful pilot in 2020, the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Bern has established nodegoat support services at the Digital Humanities program of the Walter Benjamin Kolleg.

The project 'Dynamic Data Ingestion: collecting, linking and providing interoperable research data' runs on the nodegoat Go installation of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Bern. This Swiss National Foundation (SNSF) funded SPARK project collects and reconciles data via APIs from various data sources......

Geographic visualisation of communities in the March of Ancona. Presented at the online conference '"Ghibellin fuggiasco". Spazi politici sovralocali e reti di solidarietà nell’Italia di Dante'.

Pierluigi Terenzi (University of Florence)

I use nodegoat to visualise on a map and analyse the political actors and networks of the March of Ancona, a province of the Papal state, between the 1280s and the 1310s.

The visalisation shown above represents communities according to the descriptions provided by two papal documents: on the one hand, a hierarchy of towns (from the ‘maiores’ to the ‘minores’) is visualized using different colours and sizes of the points; on the other, colours are used to distinguish autonomous towns, communities influenced by papal officials and villages controlled by cities. This allowed me to show the existence of two political spaces in the urban March (northern and southern), which is confirmed by the different nature of seigneurial power in the two areas.

The visalisation shown below displays the same for what concerns the capability of political actors to create and/or became part of wider networks, and their transformations over the concerned decades (i.e. the political networks of the March in 1317-1318). The nodegoat points-and-lines approach to visualization offers the chance to combine social network with spatial analysis and to give an incisive representation of a very unstable reality, such as that of Italy in the period concerned. nodegoat allows me to shed light on that complexity, by remarking continuity and change produced by a considerable number of political actors.

Geographic visualisation of networks between communities in the March of Ancona. Presented at the online conference '"Ghibellin fuggiasco". Spazi politici sovralocali e reti di solidarietà nell’Italia di Dante'.

Geographic visualisation of the mapped fountains in Naples.

Pamela Palomba and Emanuele Garzia (università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa di Napoli)

As part of a research project on cultural heritage we were looking for a tool that would be able to structure the information on the monuments we were studying, both spatially and chronologically, to link them together in a cross-referenced way and thus obtain new insights into the history of urban transformation.

The city and its architectural evolution gather a vast set of information connecting different fields of research: digital humanities, spatial humanities and cultural heritage. FORMAL Mapping Fountain over time and place aims to trace the shape of public water distribution in the city of Naples over the centuries. The project uses nodegoat to map the movement of monumental fountains in time and space.

The objectives were essentially two: on the one hand, to catalogue and order the study material collected and systematize it through the production of personal and multimedia cards describing the characteristics of each fountain; on the other hand, to obtain for each object the geographical visualization of its position in space and time with the tracking of its movement from one place to another in different historical periods.

nodegoat has made it possible to create a fully customized database, even if we are not experienced users, and perfectly suited to our research needs. Data modelling in the humanities is widely perceived as an epistemological process, rather than an ontological process, and we have verified that the database application interface can create new opportunities or create new challenges.

The research project was conducted by researchers from the Interdepartmental Research and Design Centre of Ateneo Scienza Nuova as part of the PhD in Humanities "Humanities and Technologies: an integrated research path" at the University of Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples.

Public User Interface: http://personal-research-domain-garziaems.nodegoat.net/

One Object of a mapped fountain.

Social visualization of 350 business letters sent by a foreign commission house in northeastern Brazil, 1810-1811, showing 798 nodes and 1,343 links among senders, recipients, and third parties mentioned in the correspondence, including their associations with specific vessels.

Laura Jarnagin Pang (Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado, USA)

I am a retired history professor who now has the amount of time to devote to research that I always craved. When I first discovered nodegoat, I didn't even know what a relational database was. I just knew that I had always dreamed of finding a way to visualize the complexities of all sorts of relationships found within extensive networks of merchants, which are the focus of my research. The nodegoat visualization samples I saw convinced me I had found the perfect medium for doing that.

My overarching research interest involves documenting the evolution of certain transnational merchant networks over time and space between roughly the latter 17th and mid 19th centuries. The many types of data this subject matter generates lend themselves to a variety of visualization opportunities. Both our perception and documentation of networks and networking can be significantly enhanced through visualizations of large amounts of data that go beyond what the written word alone can convey. Similarly, the scope, patterns, and evolution of transnational trade can be grasped quickly with geographical visualizations.

For my first nodegoat project, I focused on a subset of my research data, namely, an extensive collection of business records of an early 19th century commission house located in northeastern Brazil that was engaged in transnational commerce. Specifically, I used the outgoing correspondence generated by this firm during its first year-and-a-half in business as a window onto the international network of merchants with which it interacted. (There are no records of incoming correspondence, unfortunately.)

Some 350 letters sent by this firm contain not only sender-recipient data, but also information about third parties involved in transactions and vessels engaged in transportation. While I have entered about 85% of that information, this database is still a work in progress. Thus far it has generated some 798 nodes and 1,343 links in a social visualization projection. I have found the interconnectivity among the individuals and firms within this network to be even more extensive and dense when viewed graphically than I had been able to intuit from the written record. In nodegoat, one can easily zoom in on any given node and easily explore the linkages associated with it. Projecting that same correspondence geographically was also revelatory.

This is but one of quite a few databases I have since developed using very different foci and types of information. I often go through several iterations of database design before settling on one that best displays the phenomena I am trying to capture visually. I am still learning nodegoat and the incredible range of what can be done in it. Experimentation is key. It is also teaching me new ways to think through the data I have, especially in terms of the various diachronic relationships found within diverse types of information, and how to break down that information into categories I might not have thought to delineate otherwise.

Geographical visualization of 350 business letters sent by a foreign commission house in northeastern Brazil, 1810-1811, showing the locations of the recipients and of third parties mentioned in the correspondence.

Visualisation of catchment areas of universities within the Holy Roman Empire (1250-1550), grouped by colour.

The aim of the Repertorium Academicum Germanicum (RAG) is to develop the history of the cultural reach of a pre-modern intellectual leadership. The RAG gains a comprehensive insight into the medieval origins of the modern knowledge society with around 60.000 scholars with 360.000 observations on their life and career paths, within the framework of an analysis of contextualized prosopography. The RAG uses nodegoat as their primary data storage application and research environment. nodegoat is also used to create and publish diachronic geographical and social visualisations.

Work on the RAG began in 2001 under the direction of Rainer Schwinges and Peter Moraw, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the German research foundation and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. From 2007 to 2019 the project was funded by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities and from 2008 on as well by the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. The project will be run from 2020 at the University of Bern as part of the larger project Repertorium Academicum (REPAC), which is led by Christian Hesse and Kaspar Gubler and advised by Rainer Schwinges......