One of the projects I looked at was called “Mapping the Republic of Letters”. The Republic of Letters was a very long-distanced group of intellectuals who corresponded with each other in Europe and The Americas in the 17th and 18th hundreds. This project was created at Stanford University around 2008 (ended 2013) led by about 15 different people broken into groups ranging from 1-3 people varying depending on each case study that was researched. The researchers sought to map these letter’s traveling paths and with that data wanted to answer the questions of, what did the networks happening in this society look like? How did they evolve over time? Were they as extensive as historians and others seen to think? There are 12 case studies of people such as Galileo, Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, Locke, etc. Because each case study has different people researching it, and the people being researched are all very different in story and background, the questions being asked for each are unique for each case study. The results aren’t uniform, but the similarity remains in that these letter paths can tell us stories about each person.
Like the title claims it to be, this project is one that presents in a digitally mapped way. The letters were found from different online sources, most of the links are broken so it’s hard to know exactly where, but they were compiled and organized from their individual sources. The students of Stanford developed a program called “Palaldio” which is similar to Voyant. You input your information and then are then able to view it in numerous different ways such as a map of the world or a map connecting relating information together. The maps and graphs used for each individual are, like I said, different. Benjamin Franklin’s data was broken down in such a way that they could figure out which countries he was sending things to and receiving things from the most. Franklin being one of the few, if not only person located in America, this project makes an interesting and unique case study that applies specifically to him. Researchers further grouped his correspondence to that of men and women and figured out who he was writing to the most in each of those categories. With Locke, the researchers charted not only his correspondence with other people, but also mapped out his publications as he traveled around Europe. Galileo’s researchers graphed his letters by year. Voltaire’s map combined the concept of a map of Europe as well as showing the order and time of each letter being sent. This project very nicely compares each author to the other, but at the same time it also allowed us to learn things that make sense to learn individually about each. Each member of the society was very obviously different from the others so it’s interesting how personalized each case study was. This project has a lot that can be learned from it. Mapping out letters makes a lot of sense to me because they can be tracked so easily. They have a start and a finish. Something else I thought was interesting, and in my opinion should be a large aspect of research, was the continuality of the project. While the were creating the project, they realized that there were deeper aspects they could also be studied. One of which focused on “The Grand Tour” and they focused of where different groups of people tended to go when they were on these academic trips. Research that builds is good research. The positives outweigh the bad, but one of the weaknesses in this project is the uncertainty that all the letters were mapped. Many could have been lost, destroyed, or unpreserved. The probability of this data set being complete is low.
