Visualising and mapping historical networks of international diplomatic training

Abstract

What might methodological approaches drawing on Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) offer to sub-disciplines in geography which have traditionally been dominated by qualitative and often micro-scale research, such as historical or political geography? How might these approaches—often understood as opposing—be brought together to advance transnational research in particular? This article responds to these questions through a reflection on a recent project on the geopolitics of diplomatic training in the mid-twentieth century. Building on the established use of biography to focus transnational analyses within a complex abundance of sources, the project complemented such close-reading with computational methods of distant-reading, able to analyse large datasets to produce prosopographies and network visualisations that help identify diffuse and larger scale political and geographical relationships. The article concludes with a consideration of how such methods might be effectively integrated in the historical or political geographer's toolkit.