Mapping the Republic of Letters: A Review

Welcome to the first of several Blog Posts, 396. Today I’ll be reviewing the site Mapping the Republic of Letters, found here: http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/

 

What is this project and what does it have to offer?

 

Mapping the Republic of Letters is a project that aims to visualize the social connections, mail correspondence networks, and physical travel networks of early-modern Europe’s well-known Thinkers (think Voltaire). The About blurb relates this set of networks to our contemporary emails and academic conferences. In other words, they’re interested in how knowledge and ideas spread. Since early-modern Europe had spotty Wi-Fi at best, letters were the vessels that carried ideas all across the continent and are the main focus of many of the visualizations. Visualizations include pie charts of Franklin’s letters, points on a map to show Voltaire’s correspondence, and a map of Spanish Scientists 1600-1810.

The project has utilized case studies of individuals across a strategic geographic and temporal range. D’Alembert is an 18th century Frenchman and Kircher was a Jesuit in Rome in the 17th century, just to give you an idea. As of this blog post, there are 12 case studies, each with its own team. Condorcet’s team, for example, notes that there are over 2000 of his letters, and they’re working on creating an inventory with analytical and physical data. This contribution to digitizing, tagging, and sorting such vast quantities of primary sources could prove invaluable for future projects.

 

Who is the project for?

 

Given my perusal of the pages and visualizations, I would label this project as “Intended for Other Scholars.” The writing style assumes that some knowledge of historical methodology and the Republic of Letters already exists in the reader. It is not written with a public audience in mind. I say this for a few reasons. First, the Home page’s About blurb doesn’t provide general context for what, who, or when the Republic of Letters was. Second, many of the case study pages have methodology listed, which strikes me as something a fellow historian would be interested in reading, not something your average individual would care about. Third, the size of the text is small and the overall layout of  individual pages convey an academic tone, not a public facing history project.

 

 

Is it a valuable project?

 

I would say yes, it is.

This project opened my eyes to a new aspect of history that could be explored, that of ideas and how they move. Ideas themselves seemed far too abstract and intangible to even think of trying to track them through physical space, but as Mapping the Republic of Letters has shown, given the right sources and the right tools, you can do just that. The specific case studies are only going to be Very Exciting for other early-modern historians, but the broad value of this project lies in its approach to making the intangible tangible. This is a good lesson in expanding our own ideas of what can be utilized in history.

 

Is it a representative project?

 

I interpreted representative to refer to inclusivity. There are two places to look for inclusivity within this project: the teams themselves and the case studies. The introduction video on the Home page does include three women, which is a good place to make sure they are literally visible within the project. On the case study pages, you will find women’s names on almost every single team. I would be curious to know how much of each team is truly represented on the site. As we’ve seen before, supportive staff rarely make it into the credits.

As for the case studies themselves, the site does include women where they can, like on the Voltaire visualization filters. You can narrow it down to show you just the female correspondents. In general though, there aren’t many (or any?) women focused on. I can think of two things to explain this. This lack of female representation could be dependent on the source material. If men were the main players of the game and excluded women’s voices and contributions, we may not have existing records of women within the Republic of Letters. Another option is that contemporary historians have assumed women were not present and as such have not looked for them in sources (see Sharon Leon’s work here if you don’t know what I mean).

 

Final thoughts.

 

I love the concept of this project and the visualizations, so there wasn’t much I didn’t care for. The visualizations can be slow to load (looking at you, Voltaire), and I don’t know enough about computers and websites to be able to guess on how to fix that.

There is a typo in the About blurb, which is quite distracting as you’re trying to read it, and more context would be nice for what the Republic of Letters was. Including more women and people of colour in the case studies would also be important, as these people absolutely existed and contributed to intellectual society.

Finally, I’d be curious to know how helpful these visualizations have been for analysis and research. Sure, they look cool, and it’s fun to say you have a pie chart about Franklin’s letter writing habits, but did it help you answer important questions? To answer this, I’d have to read through the publications available through the website, but that will have to wait until after the term.

 

All images sourced from the project’s website.