What we read, mapped: the (inter)disciplinary shape of DISSINET's library

Every research project is embedded in, and dependent on, the knowledge that came before it: the sources it reads, the methods it borrows, the disciplines it draws together. DISSINET's shared Zotero library, built up since 2015 by David Zbíral and now through work of the whole team standing at 11,051 items, is that dependency made visible. A sunburst chart maps the entire collection by subject domain, from broad fields down to individual sub-topics, and the resulting shape is, in effect, a portrait of the team's own (inter)disciplinary profile: predominantly medieval historical, but substantially shaped by network science and computational methods.

2 Sep 2026

The chart reads from the centre outward: each ring is a finer subdivision of the ring inside it, and slice size is proportional to the number of items filed there. At the centre, four broad domains dominate the 8,582 items (78% of the library) that are filed into at least one subject collection: Europe and Mediterranean (Middle Ages) (4,690 items, 58% of categorised items), Networks and Network Modelling (1,005), Digital Humanities (875), and Social Sciences (483) , with smaller domains in statistics, data science, geography, and religion filling out the rest.

That shape closely tells a more specific story than “we work on medieval heresy”:

The historical core is itself internally diverse. Within “Europe and Mediterranean (Middle Ages)”, “Heresy in the West” accounts for half (2,525 items), and within that, Catharism alone is 70%. But the same domain also carries substantial holdings in Local and Regional History (484 items, split across France, Italy, and beyond), Inquisition and Repression of Heresy specifically as an institutional and legal phenomenon (483), and Monasticism (241) – the library isn’t a single reading list, it’s several adjacent ones.
Network science is substantial. 1,005 items sit under “Networks and Network Modelling”, 40% of them squarely in Social Networks and SNA and a further 16% in Historical Network Research specifically – a pool of reading large enough to function as its own disciplinary anchor.
Not SNA alone. The Digital Humanities domain (875 items) shows the same pattern from another angle: 72% of it sits under Computational Text Analysis and NLP – a body of reading substantial enough to stand on its own, and further showcasing that the historical work modeling social reality need a strong textual methodological backbone of modelling the sources themselves and run just as deep beyond network analysis as within it.
What was added under the DISSINET ERC Consolidator Grant. 6,426 of the library’s items – well over half – were added during the ERC-Consolidator-Grant-Funded DISSINET II itself (2021–2026); the rest is inherited reading, some of it going back to 2015. The library is a working record of our research in progress.

The chart is, ultimately, a visual answer to a question one could ask every research project: what does it actually stand on? For DISSINET, the answer is a deeply medieval historical core, worked on with a wide and often overlapping mix of methods – social network analysis, spatial and GIS approaches, computational text analysis, and more – rarely applied singly or by the book. As DISSINET II closes and DISSINET III begins, that reading list is also the clearest single picture of what the next phase inherits, and what it’s built to extend.

Data comes from our public Zotero library, the categories from the pie chart are Collections.

DISSINET Zotero Library