  Network representation is a crucial topic in historical social network
analysis. The debate around their value and connotations, led by humanist
scholars, is today more relevant than ever, seeing how common these
representations are as support for historical analysis. Force-directed
networks, in particular, are popular as they can be developed relatively
quickly, and reveal patterns and structures in data. The underlying algorithms,
although powerful in revealing hidden patterns, do not retain meaningful
structure and existing hierarchies within historical social networks. In this
article, we question the foreign aspect of this structure that force-directed
layout create in historical datasets. We explore the importance of hierarchy in
social networks, and investigate whether hierarchies -- strongly present within
our models of social structure -- affect our perception of social network data.
Results from our user evaluation indicate that hierarchical network
representations reduce cognitive load and leads to more frequent and deeper
insights into historical social networks. We also find that users report a
preference for the hierarchical graph representation. We analyse these findings
in light of the broader discussion on the value of force-directed network
representations within humanistic research, and introduce open questions for
future work in this line of research.
