Computational extraction of network data from large corpora
2020
Thus far researchers on Cold War intelligence have shown limited interest in network analysis. Although a certain amount of this resistance may be explained by material-related reasons, the unfamiliarity with the method itself seems to play a great role. This chapter explores how network analysis could be applied to historical sources in order to extract, analyze and visualize new knowledge. The analysis will illustrate the capability of network analysis for uncovering and identifying a document corpus’ structural properties, detecting thematic backbones of the corpus, and for analyzing network dynamics. The empirical material consists of reports on Nordic affairs produced in 1975-1989 by the East German foreign intelligence service.