Movers and haters: dynamic network visualization and analysis of an historical French controversy

Abstract This article presents the results of a novel, mixed-methods project that studied an eighteenth-century French debate about education reform using approaches from Social Network Analysis and contemporary Controversy Mapping, alongside traditional humanities methodologies. Toggling between close reading of over 200 texts, and distant reading of the whole debate as a network, revealed that this little-known polemic—which we call the Querelle des collèges—was one of many early modern quarrels, and that its central actors were not straightforwardly those one might have expected. SNA uncovered the paradoxical role in the debate of the celebrity philosophe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the previously overlooked participation of politicians, little-known teachers, and chronologically unexpected points of reference in this late-Enlightenment debate. Moreover, we underscore the value of analysing an historical controversy not just as a static network, considered at its end state, but as a dynamic entity that develops and changes over time. We show how a network can be dynamically visualized, to serve both exploratory and communicative ends. Ultimately, this article proposes a ‘bifocal reading’ method for historical controversy mapping, and identifies directions for future comparative research that might help us understand the dynamics of controversies from the past to the present.