Perceptual Effects of Hierarchy in Art Historical Social Networks

TL;DR

This study investigates how hierarchical network visualizations influence perception and understanding of historical social networks, finding that hierarchies improve insight and user preference over force-directed layouts.

Contribution

It demonstrates the perceptual benefits of hierarchical structures in social network visualizations for historical data analysis, addressing limitations of force-directed layouts.

Findings

Hierarchical visualizations reduce cognitive load.

Users prefer hierarchical over force-directed layouts.

Hierarchies lead to deeper insights into social networks.

Abstract

Network representation is a crucial topic in historical social network analysis. The debate around their value and connotations, led by humanist scholars, is today more relevant than ever, seeing how common these representations are as support for historical analysis. Force-directed networks, in particular, are popular as they can be developed relatively quickly, and reveal patterns and structures in data. The underlying algorithms, although powerful in revealing hidden patterns, do not retain meaningful structure and existing hierarchies within historical social networks. In this article, we question the foreign aspect of this structure that force-directed layout create in historical datasets. We explore the importance of hierarchy in social networks, and investigate whether hierarchies -- strongly present within our models of social structure -- affect our perception of social network data. Results from our user evaluation indicate that hierarchical network representations reduce cognitive load and leads to more frequent and deeper insights into historical social networks. We also find that users report a preference for the hierarchical graph representation. We analyse these findings in light of the broader discussion on the value of force-directed network representations within humanistic research, and introduce open questions for future work in this line of research.