Tracking the Evolution of Communities in a Social Network of Intellectual Influences

The history of intellectuals consists of a long-spanning entangled web of influences, interdependencies, and inspirations. In this paper, we construe the history of intellectuals by means of a formalized network approach, and structurally analyze how communities form and develop based on their intellectual influences. We are working with a unique data set of Linked Open Data, which we critically reflect upon. In this paper we tackle the question of whether community detection can help us to identify schools of thought, as well as patterns in the influence relations of scholars. We provide a detailed description of the process of extracting Linked Open Data, the construction of longitudinal networks, and the methodology of identifying and evaluating intellectual communities in the dataset using a community detection algorithm. Finally, we track the dynamic evolution of these communities over time, and characterize the structural patterns of their evolution, and the mechanisms of their development. We contextualize the changes in selected network structures in order to establish the merit of this method for a new perspective on the history of intellectuals, their influences, and their ideas.