Mapping The Republic of Letters
Social scientists started using quantitative methods in the 1960s. These efforts contributed to the field of cliometrics, or the “new economic history”, which utilizes computational methods to interpret a large amount of quantitative data to interpret and gain new insights into economic history. Digital history represents a new trend in historical studies to analyze a vast amount of digitized and born digital material, which was formerly only available at the location of physical archives. Historical scholars often needed to travel to these archives, and painstakingly extract information from the immense quantity of obscure sources that drive historical scholarship beyond the more common, widely available literature. Digitization, online archives, and particularly searching and sorting capabilities, have facilitated this scholarship to a large degree. However, digital techniques, which have provided new methodological and research opportunities, are complementary to traditional close readings of the sources (Edelstein et al., 2017).
In a large, multidisciplinary, multisite application to historical research, Big Data methods were used to create a research system to study the early modern Republic of Letters. The Republic of Letters, or Respublica literaria, was an intellectual community and correspondence network of writers, scholars, artists, politicians, philosophers, and other members of the intelligentsia during the 1600s and 1700s, coinciding with the “Age of Enlightenment”. The network was primarily based in Europe and the Americas. The Republic of Letters was so named (by the participants themselves, not by historians) because the main mode of correspondence was the exchange of letters, which allowed the communication network to cover great geographical distances. It was therefore a large “traffic analysis” project to explore geospatial and temporal relationships (Edelstein et al., 2017).
The Republic of letters has been widely studied by generations of scholars, mostly by close reading and analysis of the content of the individual letters. However, with the availability and accessibility of digitized sources, online archives, search and sort mechanisms, database technology, computational and visualization tools, and particularly metadata, new questions can be posed and answered. The project Mapping the Republic of Letters (henceforth called Mapping or the Mapping project), an early large scale digital history project, began in 2008, and involved Stanford University scholar Dan Edelstein, Professor of French and History; Paula Findlen, Professor of Italian History; Giovanna Ceserani (Classics and History); Caroline Winterer, Professor and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center; and digital research architect Nicole Coleman, among many others. Although the project was primarily based at Stanford University, it also included researchers, software developers, and students from the University of Oklahoma and