These are all paper that inspired me through my random walks in academia (with some emphasis on articles that deserve more attention). (It’s an updated version of a blog post from 2012.)

1. P Bearman, J Moody, R Faris (2002) Networks and history This paper blew my mind when I first read it. All of a sudden, network theory didn’t seem to have any limits. It is about checking the consistency of narratives by reconstructing their causal chains. It is also a case study of a book by the famous (and controversial) Swedish leftist Jan Myrdal. The book, Report from a Chinese village, is a pretty readable account of the Chinese civil war. (I should also say that I was traumatized by having to read his (I thought extremely boring) autobiography in high school.) BMF’s paper was also the direct inspiration to our Emergence of collective memories