The “Discovery” of Social Networks

An original experiment in open collaborative translation has made available in French the British anthropologist John A. Barnes’s seminal article six decades after it was initially published. Barnes was one of the first, if not the first, to coin the concept of“social network”. In this presentation we will first touch on the role that this article played in the development of the analysis of social networks. We will then propose a synthesis of the implications and conditions of this original experimentin collaborative translation – also in a network – which has made the text far more readily accessible to the French-speaking social science community.