15th Century Social Network Analysis?

At the end of Act I, Scene iii of Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” Catesby summons the court to dying King Edward’s bedside, leaving Richard alone on stage.  Two unnamed murderers then enter to receive direction and a warrant from Richard for the extra-judicial murder of Clarence, whom Richard has decided to kill simply because Clarence precedes him in the order of succession.  Richard’s casual bonhomie with the murderers whilst arranging the details of his brother’s death makes the scene chilling.  Such small, extra-judicial conspiracies, often with homicidal aims, are a common dramatic element for Shakespeare, particularly in the histories and tragedies.   As a dramatic structure, they hardly seem worthy of special consideration.  Some aren’t original to Shakespeare, rather coming from his sources, such as Holinshed’s Chronicles or the Brut Chronicle.

However, they may be more interesting structurally than their humble dramatic role suggests.  In the abstract, they signal a decision or action taken outside the usual frame and process of political decision making, by exceptional participants, sometimes for someone’s personal gain.  And, perhaps, they suggest a strategy for applying heterogeneous large data set analysis to historical questions.  It would be a kind of historical social network analysis and it usefulness would hinge, of course, on the kinds, specificity and quality of formal network connections that could be identified within and between the elements of large data sets.   My particular interest derives from studying the life of Sir Thomas Malory and the 15^th century social and historical context within which he lived.  So much of the evidence surrounding his life is provocatively circumstantial and open to multiple interpretations.  Is it possible additional important specific knowledge could be derived from the combined global mathematical analysis of say the databases of Parliamentary acts, recorded judicial actions, affinity structures,  and the financial records of the Exchequer?  Is it possible, for example, that a judicial decision made entirely for partisan reasons might have a characteristic social network signature or be identifiable through a particular kind of cluster analysis?

A few weeks ago, we attended a conference on current work in Southwest Archaeology.  One of the presentations, “An Examinination of Spatial Relationships Using GIS Data from the Basketmaker Communities Project,” by Tanachy Bruhns, showed how the use of cluster analysis applied to correlating diverse and heterogeneous types of information, from cost/distance analysis to local solar radiation might be used to predict the location of archaeological sites and derive additional knowledge about existing ones.  Can social networking information, implicit in large databases of historical societies be studied analogously?  It’s an appealing idea.

But challenging.  I decided to examine  a couple of possible test cases:  the decision to execute Mary Queen of Scots and Richard III’s assumption of the throne.  In both cases, a leader reluctantly assented to a major decision in her or his interest.  However, we generally credit that Queen Elizabeth really was reluctant to order the execution of her cousin queen whilst Richard’s acceptance of the petition by the citizens and nobles of London may have been an act of clever political theatre engineered by his supporters and himself.  In both cases, the number of linked events, the complexity of the affinity diagrams are daunting, not to mention categorization and characterization of linkages in any social networking diagram.  Then there’s the problem of nuance:  the process of abstraction might exclude precisely the information necessary for differentiation between such situations.

Can additional information or even significant conclusions about historical events be derived by mathematical analysis of large data sets?  It seems like an important and natural area of research for groups and institutions conducting “Digital Humanities” research.

The Big MACC, Solar Eclipses, Very, Very Old High School Parties

I’ve lived the greater portion of my life in the American southwest.  I want to know it well.

But so much isn’t known.  That’s the reason, at the deepest level, Lynn and I decided to attend this year’s  “Big Meeting at Crow Canyon.”  It’s a day of interim current reports by archaeologists working in the American southwest, sponsored by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado.

And, philosophy aside, it’s also incredibly great fun to spend a day listening to people working on the leading edge of southwest archaeology .

This year, the plain of southwestern Colorado and the cliffs of Mesa Verde were beautifully deep in new snow.  After registration, coffee and blueberry muffins that were distinctly better than usual conference fair, we gathered  in a modest conference room for the talks.

A note here about academic conferences.  I’ve attended innumerable international, national and regional  conferences.  The rigor, professionalism  and scholarship at “Big MACC” was uniformly impressive.  I filled 53 pages of my little field notebook with scribbled nearly inscrutable notes.

While I’ll necessarily forgo a précis of each of the 22 presentations I want to give you a sense of the diversity, strength and importance of the papers by describing a few.

One of my favorites was the first,  “Social Connections in the Basketmaker III period:  Preliminary Results from the Basketmaker Communities Project by Shanna Diederichs et al.  In the Basketmaker III period, 500-750 AD, (which came just before the dawn of the Chacoan age) the population of the Mesa Verde region (100 miles to the north of Chaco) grew exponentially.  Diederichs and her colleagues are doing one of my favorite things in archaeology, they’re teasing important, abstract knowledge from careful and comprehensive analysis, often of the most innocuous evidence.  In particular, their multi-aspect analysis of the Indian Camp Kiva and the Dillard site generally shows that the migration which so strongly contributed to the population growth, came from the west, from Utah.  Further,  examination of the artifacts suggest a heterogeneous matrix of concurrent lifeways.  Artifacts in the only Pueblo III great kiva in the area show it was used not just for ceremonial activities but for feasting as well.  And so the outline of one of societies which prefigured Chaco, (possibly even essentially) continues to clarify and delineate.

A very cute piece of analysis was presented by Don Simonis in “Moon House or Sun House?”  Total solar eclipses are very rare, mean time between them is around 350 years and their paths are narrow, around 200 miles.  Using the publically available NASA tools he discovered that the paths of two, one in 1257 and another in 1259 intersected over the Four Corners Region.  At the moment of total eclipse the ambient air temperature drops by as much as 20 degrees, stars become visible, birds and other animal life are silent.  Total eclipses are often short but these were relatively long.  Whilst they wouldn’t have been total in Chaco, the first would have been over the ancient ruin of “Moon House” in Cedar Mesa and the second would have been nearly so.  Interestingly, that corresponds to the mural in Moon House itself, which previously everyone interpreted as a depiction of the phases of the moon.  Simonis drew the useful conclusion that archaeologists need to make effective use of the science and scientific results beyond their discipline.

Highest marks for humor has to go to Jerry Fetterman’s presentation on “Private Land Archaeology:  Balancing Private Landowner Concerns, Development and Historic Preservation.”  He presented a list of skeptical responses to the question of whether there was an archaeological site on a piece of private land.  Second best answer:  “there’s no site there:  just a bunch of shards.”  But by far the best was, “Oh, that’s just the remains of high school parties.”  Thousand year-old high school parties, probably.  Humor aside he accurately and intelligently presented challenges and strategies for balancing valid, sometimes conflicting interests.

And there were 19 others that were startling, provocative and always intelligent.  Jason Chuipka discussed  the challenges in identifying an early Athapaskan (such as the  Diné) presence in the Four Corners, an issue I’ve always been partial to because of the manifold possibilities that more knowledge may be present in their ethnography than has been credited.  Ben Bellorado discussed the result of a physically challenging survey of sometimes remote murals in delicate and failing ruins in one of my favorite areas.  They were able to date all and added 12 new ones to the 87 already known which is simply amazing.

Finally, Laurie Webster described her progress in a project to photograph and document perishable pre-historic artifacts from Cedar Mesa stored in various museums from the Field (800 artifacts) to the Smithsonian (400).  This latter project seems one of the most vital.  Contrary to popular belief, museums are often unable to maintain perishable artifacts as they should.  Yet those artifacts are one of our most important and powerful links to that past.  An ancient Puebloan sandal or a Macaw feather sash makes the people who lived in the ancient southwest  visceral and immediate in an entirely unique way that’s too easily lost or neglected.

And there were more.  Steven Lekson didn’t attend but he was there implicitly.  In nearly every presentation there was the sense that researchers were looking well beyond the local both in space and time, a very important and good thing, particularly as the discipline is beginning to cusp the large challenge of creating, managing and making effective use of multiple large data sets.  It’s incredibly difficult to scratch out a living as an archaeologist these days, but at times, and for some, it must be one of the most rewarding.

By now, you’re probably really sorry you weren’t there.  The good news is that Big Meetings at Crow Canyon aren’t quite as rare as total solar eclipses.

In We, Charles Lindbergh explains why he undertook to fly alone across the Atlantic and why he’s writing about it by reiterating Socrates practical observation:  “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

Do you know who you are?  Grant that you are complex, nuanced and growing more so all the time.  Grant that you’re shaped by your human relationships, your experience of the natural world, possibly your religion or philosophy, your virtual experiences, your education, where you’ve traveled, where you’ve lived.  Do you know who you are?

Consider just that last element:  where you’ve lived.  Do you truly know the places you’ve lived?  They’ve shaped you.  Should you not know them, deeply?

(First image:  photo of Crow Canyon poster by author)

(2012 Solar Eclipse Image by Dr. Robert Jensen)

Three Arrows in the Ceiling of a Bologna Colonnade

Bologna, Italy is a city of colonnades which makes it pleasantly walkable in all but the most inclement weather.  In one of the ceilings are three crossbow arrows which presumably date from the 15^th or 16^th century.  When you stumble across them, or have them pointed out to you, as they were to me after a sumptuous business dinner at the Trattoria Battibecco, they’re startling.  History is suddenly immediate, continuous and palpable in the most ordinary way.  Yet the same three arrows in a museum might hardly warrant a second glance for all but the Renaissance warfare specialist.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, when the planes were slamming into the World Trade Center in New York, I was landing in Bologna, having taken off from Boston, as had many of the hijackers.  When I reached my office an hour later, I found my Italian colleagues not quietly at work at their computer screens, as they almost always were, but rather sitting rapt in front of an old black and white television watching that terrible history unfold.  I joined them and felt more than anything that I should be home in America.  History of the most horrific kind, the slaughter of innocents, was happening in my own country.

Very early the following Saturday, I went for a long walk, much of it beneath Bologna’s colonnades though it was a crisp sunny morning, and found the early Renaissance architecture and, eventually, the three arrows strangely comforting.  They reminded me that history isn’t a series of discrete dramatic, violent events, but a river, or rather a maze of rivers flowing constantly and just as the survival of that ancient city was testament to its resilience to such events, so was there the resilience and courage at home to face the events that had suddenly made the future so much more uncertain.

The three arrows and those events were brought to mind as I just finished  Craig Childs fine personal essay, Finders Keepers:  A Tale of Archaelogical Plunder and Obsession.  Through the lens of his own experience and research he explores the question of what is the right use of the remains of the past, an issue of immediate and continuing concern for those of us who live in the American southwest.  The answer is rarely easy and some choices are horrific.

One possible answer, which he doesn’t address, is to get the history and pre-history out of the museums and into the daily environment.  Of course, such a course of action is fraught with difficulties, least of which are security and proper preservation.  Nevertheless, nearly all of us live in places in which human habitation has been continual for sometimes thousands of years.  What if most of us had the experience of seeing some of that history or pre-history daily.  How would it inform our daily lives?  You can never tell what effect three old arrows in a ceiling might have.

The qualification tournament for nationals is next weekend; time for daily fencing practice.