Detecting Ottokar II’s 1248–1249 uprising and its instigators in co-witnessing networks

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Authors

ŠKVRŇÁK Jan ŠKVRŇÁK Michael OCHAB Jeremi

Year of publication 2022
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source HISTORICAL METHODS
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
web https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01615440.2022.2065397
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2022.2065397
Keywords Social network analysis; medieval Bohemia and Moravia; nobility; anomaly detection; temporal networks
Description We provide a detailed case study showing how social network analysis allows scholars todetect an event affecting the entire historical network under consideration and identify theresponsible actors. We study the middle 13th century in Czech lands, where a rigid politicalstructure of noble families surrounding the monarchs led to the uprising of part of thenobility. Having collected data on approximately 2,400 noblemen from 576 charters, weattempted to uncover social network features pointing to the rebellion and expose thenoblemen who joined it. We observed, among other such quantifiable features, assortativityincreasing before and resetting to random after the rebellion, a drop in the number of sta-ble connections and subgraph similarity between yearly networks and regional titles (bur-graves) rising in centrality above royal court officials in that period. The presented methodscan be directly translated to other person-document data of comparable or larger sizes, andwe hope it can help detect or disambiguate the timing of similar major events and the rolesof people involved in them.
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