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.

On the Importance of Being Silly

I fenced last night, (footwork only as I have some sort of shoulder muscle pull) and this morning I’m awake late and feeling scattered and silly.  For example, I’m imagining say that Archimedes had invented and marketed smart phones and some subsequent texts and conversations, say betwixt Hippolyta and Theseus or betwixt Bohemund I and Anna Comnena or betwixt John Wycliffe and John Hus (the great Christian religious reformers who preceded Luther).

As I said, silly.  So in the spirit of Python (Monte) take it further, imagine text conversations not bound by concurrency, such as Churchill texting with Marlborough, his hero and ancestor, during the battle of Britain, or between the modern architect Frank Gehry and Filippo Brunelleschi, the designer and builder of the impossible dome of Florence Cathedral.  Or George S. Patton in the Ardennes in December of 1944 texting with George S. Patton at Thermopylae in September 480 BC.

Silly, absurd, but potentially interesting.  Tuesday afternoon, on the way to another fencing lesson, I listened to Terry Gross interviewing the actor Edward Norton on her program Fresh Air.  He said that in his youth he and his friends had made amateur Kung Fu and Spaghetti Westerns with a VHS camera using just the pause and rewind buttons to cut between scenes or capture retakes.  Then there was a moment of perfect wisdom, he stated that one of the great challenges in creating a great film or finding a great filmic performance in spite of all the expensive toys, schedule constraints and bureaucracy, is finding that wild, silly spirit you that made you want to try anything with an old VHS camera.  Dylan Thomas and Dan Jones in their famous pub flights of fancy understood the same thing.

I’m particularly fond of two of Edward Norton’s characterizations:  the leper king Baldwin in “Kingdom of Heaven” in which in spite of his silver mask he manages to find the perfect balance of frailty and heroism to evoke a certain kind of medieval ideal.  The second is his performance as Eisenheim in “The Illusionist.”  When he and his childhood love played by Jessica Biel are finally reunited in a coach he delivers a simple line with perfect, understated, romantic force.  “Hello, Sophie.”  And, because it’s so minimal, so perfectly set up dramatically, it’s as good as Bogart’s “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

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.

What I'm Reading, What I've Just Seen: "The Fears of Henry IV," "Agora"

My deep interest in history comes, I believe, as a result of wanting to understand how we came to be what we are. My particular fondness for the late medieval (13th and 14th centuries) stems from the general parallels between that age and our own. It was a time of significant cultural, scientific and industrial change. Institutions were either failing or reinventing themselves. The consequence was the Renaissance, obviously.

The last few years have yielded especially fine books on the subject. Juliet Barker’s Agincourt and Ian Mortimer’s 1415: Henry V’s Year if Glory are by far the most compelling and engaging books I’ve read on the subject. Barker’s empathetic rendering of Henry and Mortimer’s much more critical one, pull you inside life at that time better than anything else I’ve read, history or fiction. Barker’s book is worth it for the description of the battle of Shrewsbury and the subsequent treatment of then Prince Henry’s facial wound alone, but is much, much more. Mortimer provides a day by day narrative of Henry’s life and major events in Europe for all of 1415 and, as a result, gave me an utterly new perspective on that age. If you want to understand that time, I doubt you could do better.

And, while we were in England, I came across Mortimer’s biography of Henry IV, The Fears of Henry IV: the Life of England’s Self-Made King. It’s a much more traditional narrative, but is engaging and reveals a life much richer and deeper than one might imagine from Shakespeare or Holinshed, my first touch stones for his character. And now, Lynn has just given me Korda’s new biography of T.E. Lawrence which looks like particularly good fun. I have that peculiar sense of fantastical wealth that comes from having good books to read.

I’m also very fond of historical film although I’m a difficult audience. Example: I’m deeply fond of Ridley Scott’s “The Kingdom of Heaven” but can hardly bear his “Robin Hood.” I expect something truly exceptional about once a decade.

So it was with great joy that I recently found “Agora,” Alejandro Amenabar’s film about the life of the great female philosopher and mathematician Hypatia who lived in Alexandria in the fourth and early fifth century A.D. It’s the most ambitious film I’ve seen in recent memory; it’s portrayal of time and place are exceptional and beautifully detailed. And, Rachel Weisz’s nuanced characterization of a beautiful woman who’s great passion was understanding planetary motion while surrounded by acolytes all suffering from various kinds of unrequited love, is beautiful.

It belongs in the company of truly great historical films, such as Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" or Ridley Scott's "The Duelists."