Fig. 1From: Communication now and then: analyzing the Republic of Letters as a communication networkNetwork reconstruction from recorded interactions. (i) In a simple social system, individuals A–D contact each other through directed letters, emails, phone calls, etc; (ii) we model undirected interactions as a time series of contact events, reconstructed from recorded contact metadata (sender, receiver, timestamp). Datasets are constrained to observation periods or snapshots (blue and red). (iii) Given an observation period, we can reconstruct a static network by creating links between nodes A–D if we observe at least one contact (solid lines). We do not account for a link if we do not observe data during the observation period (dashed lines). A common technique is to assign a link weight w (numbers) based on the number of contactsBack to article page