Abstract
The digitisation of historical archives provides the opportunity to interrogate historical sources from entirely new vantage points. We describe here the curation and analysis of a large historical correspondence network derived from the Tudor State Papers, spanning almost 100 years, from 1509 to 1603. Using combinations of different network measures to create network signatures we are able to identify different roles that individuals played in this network. These findings are then further contextualised through close-reading of the letter manuscripts. We can also connect the network perspective to text analysis of the letter contents, showing which topics were discussed disproportionately often at a given point in time, and what sub-networks of individuals were discussing them. More generally our aim is to show how historical scholarship can benefit from large-scale network analysis, text-mining, and related quantitative methodologies.
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Talk by Dr Sebastian Ahnert, Dept. of Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology (University of Cambridge) & Alan Turing Institute
Description
The digitisation of historical archives provides the opportunity to interrogate historical sources from entirely new vantage points. We describe here the curation and analysis of a large historical correspondence network derived from the Tudor State Papers, spanning almost 100 years, from 1509 to 1603. Using combinations of different network measures to create network signatures we are able to identify different roles that individuals played in this network. These findings are then further contextualised through close-reading of the letter manuscripts. We can also connect the network perspective to text analysis of the letter contents, showing which topics were discussed disproportionately often at a given point in time, and what sub-networks of individuals were discussing them. More generally our aim is to show how historical scholarship can benefit from large-scale network analysis, text-mining, and related quantitative methodologies.
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