RAPID: Digging Into the Enlightenment: Mapping the Republic of Letters

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The "Republic of Letters" - a term used between ca. 1500-1800 to describe scholarly communities and networks of knowledge - has been described as a lost continent, a country without borders. Enmeshed in trading, diplomatic, and missionary networks, it emerged in the early decades of the printing press, came to full fruition in the era which created learned societies and scholarly journals, and declined when the full-scale professionalization of scholarly life and the rise of the modern nation-state made this transnational scholarly utopia a dream of the past. Organized around individuals, institutions, and projects, the Republic of Letters was the primary means by which knowledge traveled in this earlier era. While its origins were British and European, the Republic of Letters traveled where Europeans traveled, colonized, and settled, including the colonial Americas. The Republic of Letters expresses a wide range of correlations over time and space such that, on a large scale, it can be viewed as a loose affiliation of individuals based on principles, methods of communication, and philosophical ideals over a period spanning hundreds of years. At the other extreme, it is expressed in closely affiliated clusters of individuals sharing ideas either directly in correspondence, in salons, or indirectly through publications and via intermediaries. In every case, there are many conditions and constraints influencing network processes including language, location, social circles, political events, intrigue, religious affiliation, and gender. Much of this data has been captured and will allow us to map the physical and virtual topology of the network. Combining the implications of geographic data, historical events, and social data, this is an excellent case study for how the spread of ideas at the global scale relates to the dynamical processes that operate at the local scale. Dr. Christopher Weaver and colleagues will create techniques to visualize and analyze multi-dimensional, multi-scale, and uncertain heterogeneous data extracted from historical text documents. Further, they will develop interactive designs that enable individual and collaborating scholars to dissect, revisit, share, explore, and analyze these past networks of knowledge. The new visualization methods will be combined with existing techniques to create accessible and functional tools for direct integration in and application to the ongoing study of the Republic of Letters by social science and humanities scholars. This project will contribute to computer science, social sciences, and the humanities. The contributions to computer science include data visualization and interaction techniques in support of open-ended data exploration and analysis methodologies. The contributions to the social sciences and humanities will include elucidation of the Republic of Letters through an exploration of empirical data gleaned from correspondences, publications, and travel records, combined with the interpretive expertise of geographers, historians, and literary scholars.