16 September 2025

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Networking Social

​Melita Thomas, University College London

 

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Overview 

We are all likely to be aware of the truism  that ‘it is not what you know but who you know’.  This is a way of expressing the importance of soft power and the influence that individuals can have in a social group without necessarily having expert knowledge or official roles. One way to measure soft  power is through social network analysis (SNA), a sociological tool which can be applied to the past as well as the present. SNA uses data about interactions between people to create visualisation of social networks which can be interrogated to identify power brokers, gate-keepers, and hidden influencers in a social group. Its use in historiography is increasing with projects such as Ahnert and Ahnert’s Tudor Networks (https://tudornetworks.net/) Six Degrees of Francis Bacon http://www.sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com  and Mapping the Republic of Letters http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/  

 

In this workshop, Melita Thomas, who has used SNA for her doctoral thesis, will give an introduction to the technique, discussing  some of its advantages and disadvantages for historical research, sharing some of the fascinating insights from her research into the social and political networks of Queen Mary I of England, and warning of potential pitfalls. 

 

Chair

Sophie Bacchus-Waterman​

 

Presenter bio

Melita Thomas has a Master’s in Historical Research from the Institute of Historical Research, and is a final year doctoral candidate at UCL. Her thesis, the Power of Networks and the Networks of Power, uses social network analysis to re-examine the political and social networks of Mary I while her Master’s dissertation examined how the relationship between the medieval queens of England and the City of London affected national politics.