In Stanford University’s project “Mapping the Republic of Letters“, scientists added life to the Republic of Letters by creating sophisticated, interactive visualization tools. Two of the project’s goals are to understand what the shape and structure of the Republic of Letters are at any given time and explore the intellectual network for a given member of the Republic.
In this project, the nodes are the Republic of Letters’ members, and the edges are their connections. Such connections can be weak or strong. Nonetheless, what is unique about this narrative panorama is its illustrations and different sizes to represent importance, which increase engagement and effectiveness. Furthermore, one can explore how the Republic of Letters’ network evolved over time, using the timeline at the bottom of the visualization. However, “Mapping the Republic of Letters” goals is much broader: it aims to create a repository of metadata on early-modern scholarship, and guidelines for future data capture.
The project also has several case studies that bring together several researchers interested in the specific person to study. Then, the researchers analyzed in detail how an author’s work has developed over the decades, what are the most frequently quoted primary source, and other questions of interest. Currently, there are 12 publicly available case studies.
Hi Luisa! This is a really cool project, and I agree with you that the illustrations and the layout make this project particularly fun to look at and engage with. It’s interesting to see a network laid out in this way, since a lot of the time it seems like it’s represented more as dots with a bunch of connections between them!
Hi Luisa, I also thought it was really cool how they used size to represent the importance of the figures! I think one of the best things about data visualization is the ability to gain a lot of information from looking at a picture (rather than having to compare numbers in a raw data table, for example) and I thought that this project did a great job utilizing visualization tools so that you could understand a lot about the structure of the Republic of Letters from just looking at the panoramic timeline.