01Goal
Build a document corpus and computational tools that identify and analyze networks underlying texts to understand the structure and dynamics of a society at a given moment using graph-theory models.
Frontier science
Relational Network Analysis
02General objective
Develop and implement computational tools grounded in graph theory to identify and analyze networks underlying texts written from a witness’s or participant’s perspective, in order to understand social structure and dynamics in time.
03Specific objectives
- 1Analyze interactions of underlying networks with graph theory to understand social dynamics in a given period.
- 2Build and implement algorithms to classify and identify constitutive elements, their relationships, and the construction of networks from the corpus.
- 3Construct mathematical models to study and understand the structure of networks embedded in the corpus.
- 4Publish a digital repository with a broad collection of historical corpora—mainly diaries and correspondence—available to the scientific community and the public.
04Publications
- Motilla Chávez, J. A. & Zuccolotto, A. (2025). La Batalla de Ahualulco, un estudio Histórico-Arqueológico. Revista De Arqueología Histórica Argentina Y Latinoamericana, 18(2), 12-35.
- Motilla, J., et al. (2025). Artivismo como concepto y práctica en Twitter (ahora X). Una lectura desde la ciencia de redes. In A. E. Mancilla (Ed.), Diseño y Arte desde la Complejidad.
- Motilla-Chávez, J.A., Espitia, D., Galán-Vásquez, E. et al. (2025). A Methodological Framework for the Use of AI Tools in Automated Workflows for Generating Validated and Structured Historical Datasets. PREPRINT.
- Motilla-Chávez, J.A., Ugalde, E. & Galán-Vásquez, E. (2024). Social networks from dailies: the observer’s point of view. Applied Network Science 9, 67.
05Talks
- Espitia, D. and Motilla, J.A. The structure and dynamics of the city of San Luis Potosí, Mexico: 1767-1821... Data Biographies, Università della Svizzera italiana, February 13-14, 2025.
- Espitia, D. and Motilla, J.A. La estructura y dinámica de la ciudad de San Luis Potosí, México: 1767–1821... 7th Encuentro de Humanistas Digitales, ITESM, October 15-17, 2025.
- Motilla, J.A. In and Out of the Canon: A Computational Reading of Ignacio Montes de Oca y Obregón’s Concept of Modernity (1840–1921). Helsinki Centre of Intellectual History, December 15-17, 2025.
06Datasets
07Events
- Summer School
Training days linked to the project.
08GLIMPSE
The computational methodology converges in GLIMPSE (Graph-based Language Interpretation and Modeling for Past Societal Epistemology), a platform to process and model historical texts at scale with reproducible flows. It integrates ML and LLMs for OCR correction, entity recognition, and topic detection in automated pipelines, treating texts as relational data to enable structural and dynamic analysis of historical societies.
GLIMPSE visualizations and captures coming soon.
09Model
The generative model assumes an encompassing scale-free social network (Barabási–Albert) and treats networks observed in texts as subgraphs induced by a low-connectivity observer. Sampling rules weight neighborhood nodes and highly connected nodes; events follow an exponential distribution in the number of nodes. The induced subgraphs are analyzed with degree distribution, clustering, cliques, and small-world properties, and compared against synthetic realizations to infer dynamics from partial observations.
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