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Findings and Implications

  • Introduction
  • Data and Preprocessing
  • Network Construction
  • Social Network Analysis
  • Interactive Maps
  • Findings and Implications
  • Conclusion

    • Findings and Implications

    The temporal findings are consistent with Yang’s career trajectory and with the larger political context of twentieth-century Chinese and American science. The earliest decades are dominated by family and youth-related photo records in China. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the coauthorship layer is heavily US-centred and reflects Yang’s most productive period in postwar theoretical physics. After 1971, and especially in the 1990s and early 2000s, the photo layer shows a visible reorientation toward Mainland China, Hong Kong, and a wider set of ceremonial and institutional relationships.

    This matters in at least three ways. For historians of science, the project shows that Yang’s long US-based scientific career and his later reconnection to China should be studied as one continuous but shifting network, not as separate biographies. For the sociology of science, the low overlap between layers demonstrates that coauthorship is only one dimension of scientific sociality. For digital humanities and archival method, the project offers a replicable workflow for reconstructing multiplex historical networks from partial and heterogeneous records.

    The project also shows the value of combining close reading with computational methods. Manual inspection was necessary for identifying and validating correspondence records, while computational tools made it possible to enrich, standardise, and compare large numbers of relationships across time and space. This balance between archival judgment and scalable processing is one of the project’s methodological strengths.

    [Photograph of C.N. Yang delivering a speech at the King Faisal International Prize Award Ceremony in Riyadh]. (2001). The CN Yang Archive (Hanger 11, Folder 1). The Chinese University of Hong Kong Library, Hong Kong.