As a legal data analyst, explain the role of network analysis in legal history research and outline its applications in analyzing court proceedings.

Court proceedings and its records are interesting for the legal historian, specifically from a perspective of law and its development over the centuries. Such cases are commonly analyzed by intensive reading and notetaking and by identifying commonalities, differences and relationships between documents or elements of documents. These cases can be used to explore whether human analysis can be improved, or at least complemented, by applying network analysis. The latter is a computer science method that allows for the mapping, measuring and visualising of relationships between individuals, groups and other types of information. In this form of analysis, nodes are connected through edges, with the nodes being individuals, groups or information, and the edges being used to link the nodes. By treating court decisions as nodes, and linking the allegations in those cases to legislation and to other cases or scholarly work, network analysis can create a citation network that signals how information flows or has flown, and the extent to which certain nodes in the network are authoritative. Network analysis has been used for several purposes in the legal field: for analyzing criminal behaviour and terrorist networks; for finding authoritative cases at courts; and for examining legal social networks, networks of statutes and regulatory codes and patent citations. Volkaert argues that network analysis is both conceivable and useful in legal history. His article provides an overview of research in digital legal history using network analysis and focusing on case citation networks and what he refers to as 'digital-dogmatic legal history'. According to Volkaert, network analysis can complement dogmatic and contextual legal history, although qualitative juridical interpretations for understanding law remain necessary. By applying network analysis to a selected number of cases of the Court of Friesland, we further explore its potential for legal history research purposes.