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Selena Daly - Social Network Analysis

Page history last edited by Selena Daly 9 years, 4 months ago

A Social Network Analysis of the Italian Futurists during the First World War

 

The work I'm presenting here is part of a larger project I have been working on for a while. I am interested in examining the development of the Italian Futurist movement over time and space, and have begun to do this by plotting the correspondence of members of the movement during the years of the First World War. The position of Marinetti (the movement's leader) within the group has been a topic of interest to scholars for decades, and it has frequently been argued that he became marginal to the group's development during the war years as a result of his preoccupation with his military service.  An approach such as SNA allows us to empirically analyse these claims. I want to investigate how the network of contact changes over time; which figures are most active in the network; and what sub-groups of Futurists can be identified. 

 

I have created a database of over 700 letters (which I am continuing to add to) sent between Futurists and written in the period August 1914 - November 1918. I then plotted these connections in Gephi.

 

 

I didn't find this visualization particularly clear so got a more competent collaborator to plot the data in R, resulting in the second image. Both plots show the volume of letters sent between two figures over the duration of the war. As this project advances, I will also create plots for the individual years to see how the centrality of different figures changes over time. 

These initial plots confirm the centrality of Marinetti within the network, and also highlight the role of other figures within the movement and identifies some sub-groups led by Emilio Settimelli and Giacomo Balla, for example. The importance of the figure of Nina Angelini, Marinetti's secretary who acted as an intermediary for him while he was at the front, further highlights the leader's central position within the network. 

 

There are of course limitations to using SNA in this way. The structure of the network is determined by the availability of letters to log. Published epistolaries (included here) tend to feature the letters of Marinetti and one other Futurist member, which leads to a distortion of the network. The logging of unpublished letters which I have accessed in archives helps to balance this out to an extent, but is of course still influenced by the accessibility of archives and certain figures will remain underrepresented. One possible way of limiting the effect of this issue is to create and log 'ghost' letters, for example if somebody thanks a correspondent for a letter, I should create an entry for that letter, regardless of whether or not I have seen it, which would help reduce the bias of the dataset. 

 

 

 

 

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