Using Gephi to model philosophical networks in medieval Christendom

I was playing around with the Gephi beta graph designer, and thought it would be interesting to map out the network of Christian philosophers during the period 1000-1200.

Emphasis on betweenness centrality. Betweenness centrality is a measure of a node’s centrality in a network, equal to the number of shortest paths from all vertices to all others that pass through that node. Lanfranc is hardly a well-known figure in philosophy, but he looms conspicuously large here.

 

Emphasis on degree of linkage. Nodes are emphasized depending on the number of immediate neighbors they have.

Adapted from Randall Collins’s “Sociology of Philosophies” (p.464).