I would imagine that creating a tutorial on social network analysis would be very difficult. The nature of the tool makes it so that giving sample data and asking someone to do network analysis would be highly unrealistic. Social Network Analysis seems like the sort of tool that fuels an entire research project as its central focus rather than a helpful tool to make life easier. It is a project in and of itself.

Not only is social network analysis a project that can shape an entire research project, but the background and context is necessary before an idea of how you will code your information can even begin. More so than anything we have done so far, this is really a tool that can not be valuable until we need it to answer our research questions, which drives how we use it.

Writing the tutorial as a narrative to give us an idea of what is involved is really the only way to instruct in this case. We cannot know the intricacies of Marten Düring’s research. Even putting in his sample data and doing things with it can only go so far. It shows us what we can do (look isn’t this cool!) but may have little relevance to our work. We may never even have the types of research questions that social network analysis can work with. Or the data for that matter that would facilitate using it!

But, after the semester of this course I feel like I will not remember every tutorial, every cool thing I could do, or every tool available to me. But knowing what’s out there, being informed of what digital humanities and history are doing can, in the long run, only make us more informed and inclusive historians. Some day we may come back to these same tutorials and go through them in detail, but probably not. But we will in interactions with future professors, mentors, students and colleagues know that digital historians are out there and doing important things. And isn’t it all about awareness at the end of the day?