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Historical Networks and Identity Formation: Digital Representation of Statistical and Geo- Data: Case Study of Norwegian Migration to the USA (1870-1920)

The article is a result of the collaborative interdisciplinary workshop, which involved expertise from social sciences, history and digital humanities. It showed how computer mediated ways of researching historical networks and identity formation of NorwegianAmericans substantially complemented historical and social sciences methods. By using open API of the National Archives of Norway we used statistical, geoand text data to produce an interactive temporal visualization of regional origins in Norway at the USA map. Spatial visualization allowed highlighting space and time and the original regional belonging in their home countries as fundamental values for understanding social and cultural dimensions of migrants’ lives. We claim that data visualizations of space and time have performative materiality (Drucker 2013). They open a free room for a researcher to come up with his/her own narrative about the studied phenomenon (Perez and Granger 2015). Visualizations make us reflect on the relationship between the phenomenon and its representation (Klein 2014). This digital method supplements the classical sociological and socio-constructivist methods and can therefore enrich our knowledge of social phenomena. In the article, we show, what potentials this visualization has in relation to the particular field of emigration studies, when entering into a dialogue with the existing historical research in the field. The work of representation in historical and social research Historical and sociological research has been recently dominated by socio-constructivist approaches and methods for reproducing social reality. Both, the participants within the studied phenomenon and researchers are perceived as actors, who enter into various