A Longitudinal Analysis of a Social Network of Intellectual History

The history of intellectuals consists of a complex web of influences and interconnections of philosophers, scientists, writers, their work, and ideas. How did these influences evolve over time? Who were the most influential scholars in a period? To answer these questions, we mined a network of influence of over 12,500 intellectuals, extracted from the Linked Open Data provider YAGO. We enriched this network with a longitudinal perspective and analyzed time-sliced projections of the complete network differentiating between within-era, inter-era, and accumulated-era networks. We thus identified various patterns of intellectuals and eras and studied their development in time. We show which scholars were most influential in different eras, and who took prominent knowledge broker roles. One essential finding is that the highest impact of an era's scholar was on their contemporaries, and that the inter-era influence of each period was strongest on the consecutive era. Furthermore, we see quantitative evidence that there was no rediscovery of Antiquity during the Renaissance; rather, there has been a continuous reception of it since the Middle Ages.