Graduate Student Reflections: How Network Analysis Influenced My Research

As a fifth year PhD candidate in the History Department, I have combined my desire to learn everything I can about female preachers in the early American republic with my enthusiasm for any and all data visualizations and digital humanities tools. Committed to these women, just as they committed themselves to their itinerant ministries, I have expanded my research to include more women, especially Black female preachers, and those from England and Canada who came to the States, and vice-versa. My analysis in my dissertation—a traditional history dissertation—intersects an interest in gender, race, and body studies with a religious history methodology. My focus remains on the women who preached, despite opposition from their families, husbands, pastors, and many others. I center the women, and I still emphasize their relationships with others who supported them.

Curious about network analysis, but daunted by Gephi, I applied to attend the Mathematical Humanists workshop for the Graphs and Networks Workshop. Even more excitingly, I was offered the Graduate Research Assistant position over the summer, meaning I could not only attend the Networks workshop, but also the Statistics workshop, and help build out the readings list and lesson plans for each. While acting as the GRA, I not only got to pore over the readings and data as part of my job, but also met two dozen individuals also interested in DH and curious to learn more. I am still in contact with multiple other students from the workshops. 

As I created my dataset for the Networks workshop, however, I realized some glaring omissions. I annotated four female preaching memoirs, which represented three white women and one Black woman. Two were self-authored, and two were written by others. In all, I had a case study of 360 nodes representing female preachers, male clergy, lay supporters, and those they converted. 

I immediately noticed the presence of men as support nodes throughout each network. Overall, I had 123 male clergy represented, and 256 men overall. Many, not all, of the men in the network were pastors themselves. Those who were not preachers still involved themselves in their local churches, and provided support to female preachers through charity, providing a place for female preachers to stay while in town, or simply as those who listened to their sermons and believed in their calling from God. Male clergy in the networks overwhelmingly aided these women by providing places to preach, writing letters of recommendation for female preachers to find new opportunities in other towns/cities, and publishing in periodicals or other avenues about women’s right to preach. Despite centering female preachers and those women supporting them, the power of established male ministers in creating ways for women to preach.

At first, my discovery discomfited me. I have spent years focused on women’s and gender history, interested exclusively in the lives of women. I tailored class assignments at both my institutions around this focus, picking gendered topics for term papers, and picking only women to write about in a local history class where we authored biographies of historical actors. Yet, the importance of allied men in fostering these networks and providing legitimacy made sense: female preachers with male backing did better. The institutional backing of a male minister shielded women from some opposition, and also simply gave them chances to preach. Undeniably, the men are overrepresented in this network, even as I center women. 

The network analysis built out of a dataset of female preachers and their support nodes highlights an oft-exemplified tenet of gender studies: how easy it is to overlook certain groups. Ironically, here I missed the importance of [white] men in bolstering their female counterparts. Until I created a dataset, I discounted men, just as historians and other scholars have often discounted the role of women and people of color in other areas of research. A clear-cut argument for digital humanities, this network analysis presents the importance of data in historical arguments, while also reminding gender scholars—and me—that gender encompasses more than just women. 

To learn more about the Mathematical Humanists Project or to apply for one of their summer workshops, please visit: https://mathhumanists.org