Multispecies Networks: Visualizing the Psychological Research of the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex

Abstract

In our current moment, there is considerable interest in networks, in how people and things are connected. This essay outlines one approach that brings together insights from actor-network theory, social network analysis, and digital history to interpret past scientific activity. Multispecies network analysis (MNA) is a means of understanding the historical interactions among scientists, institutions, and preferred experimental animals. A reexamination of studies of sexual behavior funded by the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex between the 1920s and the 1940s demonstrates the applicability of MNA to clarifying the relations that sustained this area of psychology. The measures of weighted degree and betweenness can highlight which nodes (whether organisms or institutions) were particularly "central" to this network. Rats featured as the animals most widely studied during this period, but the analysis also reveals distinct institutional and disciplinary cultures where different species were favored as either surrogates for humans or representatives of more general biological groups.

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