Modelling Women's networks in the Roman world: a historical renewal enabled by digital humanities”
Modéliser les réseaux de femmes dans le monde romain : un renouvellement historiographique permis par les humanités numériques
Résumé
Network studies have been used and developed during the last 20 years in medieval, modern and contemporary history while missing from ancient roman history. Yet, such as sociology has shown, networks approach reveals a more complex hierarchical organization in social groups than previously thought. Exploring networks brings out new kinds of roles and powers such as intermediaries, whose role are clearly invisible in a static perspective. The recent development of digital tools applied to the humanities, such as networks visualization softwares, has allowed new research prospects which have permitted a historiographical renewal concerning women's agency in ancient Rome.
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the use of new digital tools offers a new look at social practices and the role of women in the Roman World. Networks modelling allows us to determine different kinds of relational: individual or collective, situational or structural. Explaining the research methodology which links network analysis and gender studies, we will present the global analysis of women’s networks in the Roman World during the 1st century. Through the evocations of their interactions that Roman and Greek ancient historians have mentioned, we will study the shape and the organization of women’s networks created with the open-source software GEPHI.