I’d like to propose a session on network analysis. My own project is a historical social network analysis of the German intelligentsia during the Enlightenment period. It relates people by ties such as family, patronage, or citing one another’s work. I would like to talk with people at THATCamp about the project and see other people’s network projects. I’d really like to find a collaborator or two, perhaps especially someone who is more tech-savvy than I am with databases and visualization/analysis software. A later phase of my project will involve OCR’ing texts I have scanned in by the intellectuals being studied, and then running topic-modeling (text-mining) software on the texts to come up with keywords. These keywords would then form other nodes in the growing network, which would then include people, institutions, books and ideas. Possible topics to discuss during a THATCamp session:

–designing the architecture of a database, in e.g. MS Access or FileMaker

–what kind of projects are good for network analysis?

–good database software to use

–visualization software, e.g. NetworkWorkbench

–topic-modeling (a subject I know only the tiniest bit about)