Over the last decades, cultural heritage institutions have provided extensive machine-readable data, such as bibliographic and archival metadata, full-text collections, and authority records containing multitudes of implicit and explicit statements about the social relations between various types of entities. In this paper, we discuss how approaches to the creation and operation of advanced research infrastructure for historical network analysis (HNA) based on heterogeneous data sources from cultural heritage institutions can be examined and evaluated. Based on our interdisciplinary research, we describe challenges and strategies with a special focus on the issue of data processing, sketch out the advantages of human-centered project design in the form of a preliminary co-design workshop, and present an iterative approach to data visualization.