Discussion: Social and spatial networks

The recent digitization of various historical sources opens the exciting possibility of discussing quantitatively a large number of phenomenon in social and human sciences. In particular, many datasets are structured as graphs, such as relations between individuals or settlement, roads or other infrastructures, and are usually georeferenced. The corresponding graphs are thus 'spatial networks', embedded in space and containing information which is not only topological. Spatial networks are very common, and it is important to recognize them as such, as their properties are very different from generic complex networks. In this chapter, I will discuss the most salient facts about spatial networks, how they are different from complex networks and how spatial constraints induce specific properties. The main purpose is to help understanding what is generic about spatial networks and how we can characterize them quantitatively.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC

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