Course 10: Network Analysis

Ramona Roller · ETH Zurich

Lecturer

Ramona Roller is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Systems Design at ETH Zurich, where she applies computational social science methods to historical and sociological questions. Her research focuses on societal transitions and communication networks, especially the sixteenth-century European Reformation, using social network analysis, event history models, and causal inference frameworks to understand processes such as the spread of Protestantism. She received her PhD in Computational Social Science from ETH Zurich and holds an MSc in Computational Science from the University of Amsterdam. Her methodological contributions include work on theory-driven statistics for the digital humanities and temporal network analysis of historical letter correspondence.

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Lecture Overview

Overview

Roller introduces network analysis as a formal way of representing relationships and interactions. Her lecture connects everyday notions of networks to a more precise analytical vocabulary and then situates networks within the study of complex systems and emergent behavior.

Main Points

Networks represent entities and the relations between them through nodes and edges.
The lecture distinguishes between long-lived relationships and short-lived interactions, both of which can be modeled as networks.
Roller stresses that networks are representations of reality, not reality itself, so every network model is already an interpretive abstraction.
She links network analysis to complex systems, where local interactions generate larger emergent patterns without central control.
The lecture also encourages students to think about which systems in digital humanities can be modeled as networks and what kinds of questions such models can answer.

Examples Mentioned

Reformation correspondence networks
Social media and the web
Power grids
Termite mounds, bird flocks, and mass panic as complex systems

Source transcript: transcripts/Course_10_Roller_NetworkAnalysis.txt

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