Extracting socio-cultural networks of the Sudan from open-source, large-scale text data

This paper was originally presented at the annual conference of the Sudan Studies Association (SSA) at Purdue University in 2010, and has been adapted for this publication. At the SSA meeting, we had the opportunity to present our work on a computer-supported methodology for extracting and analyzing over-time network data based on open source text data about the Sudan, and to receive feedback from subject matter experts on the Sudan. Our presentation was part of a panel on “Data analyses of Sudan’s reality”. In this panel, the collaborators from a multi-university research initiative that focuses on rapid ethnographic retrieval reported on their work. The field of Network Analysis provides theories and methods for representing and examining the structure, functioning and dynamics of interactions between social agents, infrastructures and information (Wasserman and Faust 1994;