Confronted with the massification of data and embracing ever more global questions, historical sciences are concerned with increasingly complex objects. And if the term « network » is widely used in historical research, it is because it seems to be effective to describe these tangled, evolutionary and multilevel structures. This introduction offers a reflection on the use of formal network analysis in history. We show that there are several ways of transforming historical sources into a network and that we can use multilayer models to understand the complexity of an archival collection.

To go further, a few online publications: Grandjean 2019 EN https://halshs.archivesouvertes.fr/h..., Grandjean 2018 FR https://halshs.archivesouvertes.fr/t..., Grandjean 2017 FR https://halshs.archivesouvertes.fr/h... IT https://dx.doi.org/10.14647/87204.

Contents
00:00 Introduction
00:35 Giving context to a relation
05:21 Graph theory
13:21 Historical networks
18:39 A Complex case study
24:02 Multilayer network
30:58 Conclusion