Past Networks is the open online repository portal for finding network data about the human past. It contains metadata descriptions and links to where the datasets are stored. This data is crucial to enable comparative studies to understand long-term change in the social networks of our species.
Past Networks encourages open publication, documentation and re-use of past social network data in history, archaeology, classics, network science and related disciplines.
Past Networks is an initiative by the main international communities in past network research. It is integrated with the Historical Network Research Journal publication process, and with the events organised by the communities.
Every night a full export of all published networks is created in ndjson
format, where each line is a json
network object.
Please see individual datasets for license information.
Past Networks has been created by the Past Social Networks Project directed by Tom Brughmans, and made possible by The Carlsberg Foundation’s Young Researcher Fellowship (CF21-0382).
We thank Aarhus University’s Centre for Humanities Computing, Peter Bjerregaard Vahlstrup and Per Møldrup-Dalum.