Foreword: Time and Temporality as Categories of Connectedness

Time and temporality need to be considered essential concepts when studying networks of the past. Their implementation, however, introduces varying forms of complexity, which provides challenges to navigate when operationalized as attributes of humanities data; as categories and methods of analyses; and even as factors in our research process in need to be optimized. Adjusting to temporal perspectives in networks highlights the inherent multiplicity, ambiguities, and uncertainty in our data, in our concepts, and in our models of analysis, and within the network dynamics studied. But when studying historical networks as static networks, these issues often remain hidden and neglected, potentially skewing our interpretation of networks of the past. Due to the fundamental differences between temporal and static networks, Holme & Salamäki (2023) stressed the need for “new methods, new concepts, [and] new questions” (p. 1). To address these challenges, in July 2023, the conference “GrapHNR 2023” gathered an interdisciplinary group of researchers to discuss “Graphs and Networks in the Fourth Dimension – Time and Temporality as Categories of Connectedness.”