Application of the Social Network Analysis Method to the Reconstruction of a Social and Kinship Network Based on the Marriage Registers of the 18th Century Parish of Żarki
Application of the Social Network Analysis Method to the Reconstruction of a Social and Kinship Network Based on the Marriage Registers of the 18th Century Parish of Żarki

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this article is to describe a practical application of the Social Network Analysis (SNA) method in demographic and historical research. It was used to reconstruct the social and kinship network of the 18th-century parish of Żarki on the basis of marriage registers. The SNA method is still rarely used by Polish historians. The article uses mathematical graph models, created on the basis of scenarios, to better analyze the role of two basic concepts (nodes and kinship) in the social network, resulting in the specification of the central role of kinship in the network. The relationships described in the article are those of marriage, testimony and kinship. The Gephi network visualization program was used to generate a digraph of the parish of Żarki (1718–1720), as an example of a small town community.

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