One of the projects I looked at was called \u201cMapping the Republic of Letters\u201d. 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\u2019s 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\u2019t uniform, but the similarity remains in that these letter paths can tell us stories about each person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like the title\nclaims it to be, this project is one that presents in a digitally mapped way.\nThe letters were found from different online sources, most of the links are\nbroken so it\u2019s hard to know exactly where, but they were compiled and organized\nfrom their individual sources. The students of Stanford developed a program\ncalled \u201cPalaldio\u201d which is similar to Voyant. You input your information and\nthen are then able to view it in numerous different ways such as a map of the\nworld or a map connecting relating information together. The maps and graphs\nused for each individual are, like I said, different. Benjamin Franklin\u2019s data\nwas broken down in such a way that they could figure out which countries he was\nsending things to and receiving things from the most. Franklin being one of the\nfew, if not only person located in America, this project makes an interesting\nand unique case study that applies specifically to him. Researchers further\ngrouped his correspondence to that of men and women and figured out who he was\nwriting to the most in each of those categories. With Locke, the researchers\ncharted not only his correspondence with other people, but also mapped out his\npublications as he traveled around Europe. Galileo\u2019s researchers graphed his\nletters by year. Voltaire\u2019s map combined the concept of a map of Europe as well\nas showing the order and time of each letter being sent. This project very\nnicely compares each author to the other, but at the same time it also allowed\nus to learn things that make sense to learn individually about each. Each\nmember of the society was very obviously different from the others so it\u2019s\ninteresting how personalized each case study was. \n\n This project has a lot that\ncan be learned from it. Mapping out letters makes a lot of sense to me because\nthey can be tracked so easily. They have a start and a finish. Something else I\nthought was interesting, and in my opinion should be a large aspect of research,\nwas the continuality of the project. While the were creating the project, they\nrealized that there were deeper aspects they could also be studied. One of\nwhich focused on \u201cThe Grand Tour\u201d and they focused of where different groups of\npeople tended to go when they were on these academic trips. Research that\nbuilds is good research. The positives outweigh the bad, but one of the\nweaknesses in this project is the uncertainty that all the letters were mapped.\nMany could have been lost, destroyed, or unpreserved. The probability of this\ndata set being complete is low.\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the projects I looked at was called \u201cMapping the Republic of Letters\u201d. 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w20dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w20dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w20dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w20dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w20dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w20dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w20dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions\/207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w20dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w20dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancroxall.net\/w20dh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}