SoNAR. Social Network Analysis and related Research.

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Achim Bonte; Professorin Vivien Petras, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Sociological Theory ; History of Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 558129968

The project establishes an automatic data processing pipeline to extract explicit and implicit knowledge about agents and agent relations. The knowledge is encoded with the data of cultural heritage organizations like libraries, archives, and museums. However, it is often hidden, stored in silos, and difficult to identify. SoNAR will foster Historical Network Research by integrating those data. Scholars will be provided with advanced interfaces to explore a generic social Knowledge Graph and to curate data sets for applying data science methods to analyze the historical networks, e.g. with R or Python. The integration of data sets will be generic to support historical network research as broadly as possible. The project will be thus supported by representatives of multiple scholarly domains (advisory board), and will consider tasks following the project, e.g. maintenance and extension of the social Knowledge Graph.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)