Dr Ruth Ahnert (Queen Mary, University of London) and

Dr Sebastian Ahnert (Department of Physics, University of Cambridge)

Tuesday 26 November at 5pm

Room G21A, Senate House, London

We are pleased to announce the second meeting of the London Digital Humanities Group this semester, at which we will welcome Dr Ruth Ahnert and Dr Sebastian Ahnert. These developers of an innovative methodology for early modern literary and sociological research will introduce their current project, to be followed by discussion. 

All are welcome. Please note that we will begin promptly at 5pm.

In Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading and Matt Jockers’ Macroanlysis, published this year, there are short chapters exploring the application of network analysis to the study of literature. These coincide with the emergence of a whole host of projects that seek to map networks of communication, influence, and even metaphors. These studies, however, only begin to scratch the surface of the kind of analysis that is possible with the computational and mathematical tools developed by network scientists; most get little beyond visualization.

In this paper we will discuss our work on the applications of quantitative network analysis (QNA) to Tudor letter collections. In a forthcoming publication we have reconstructed and analyzed the social and textual organization of the underground community of Protestants living in England during the reign of Mary I from a body of surviving letters now held in the British Library and Emmanuel College Library, Cambridge. QNA offers several ways of measuring how ‘well-connected’ an individual is. Unsurprisingly, martyrs are well connected by virtue of their social status and significant correspondence; the analysis, however, also reveals that other individuals are well connected, not as a result of a large number of connections, but because of whom they are connected to. The latter category describes letter couriers, and financial sustainers. These kinds of figures have special network properties; by measuring and comparing these properties we are able to predict other figures who might have served similar roles. In this paper today we will discuss the ways that we can apply the methods and measures we have developed working on this relatively small dataset to our new research, which is based on the vast amount of correspondence collected in the State Papers dating from the accession of Henry VIII to the death of his daughter Elizabeth.