16 September 2025
Workshop: Networking and Network Analysis
Melita Thomas (University College London)
Overview
We are all likely to be aware of the truism that ‘it is not what you know but who you know’. This is a way of expressing the importance of soft power and the influence that individuals can have in a social group without necessarily having expert knowledge or official roles. One way to measure soft power is through social network analysis (SNA), a sociological tool which can be applied to the past as well as the present. SNA uses data about interactions between people to create visualisation of social networks which can be interrogated to identify power brokers, gate-keepers, and hidden influencers in a social group. Its use in historiography is increasing with projects such as Ahnert and Ahnert’s Tudor Networks (https://tudornetworks.net/) Six Degrees of Francis Bacon http://www.sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com and Mapping the Republic of Letters http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/.
In this workshop, Melita Thomas, who has used SNA for her doctoral thesis, will give an introduction to the technique, discussing some of its advantages and disadvantages for historical research, sharing some of the fascinating insights from her research into the social and political networks of Queen Mary I of England, and warning of potential pitfalls.
