This project will focus on a corpus of 18th-century 53,000 letters, and will extract and interpret details relating to people, places, times, and subjects, and identify new ways of visualising and annotating these relationships.

Digging into the enlightenment: Mapping the Republic of Letters

The project will work on the Electronic Enlightenment corpus, one of the largest standardised digitised collections of letters from this period. The letters, featuring a variety of writers and recipients from Europe, Asia and the Americas, are often rich in geographical and personal detail, and constitute a resource that is a true cross-section of early modern society. The project will demonstrate a new visual analysis methodology that helps humanities researchers to browse, mine, organize and share not only complex data sets but also their detailed observations and insights.  

Project Staff

Project Directors

• Robert McNamee, University of Oxford robert.mcnamee@e-enlightenment.info
• Dan Edelstein, Stanford University, danedels@stanford.edu
• Chris Weaver, University of Oklahoma weaver@cs.ou.edu

Bookmark and Share
Summary
Start date
1 January 2010
End date
31 March 2011
Funding programme
Digitisation and Content
Strand
Digging into data challenge
Lead institutions

University of Oxford

Partner institutions
University of Oklahoma
Stanford University
Committees
  • JISC Infrastructure and Resources Committee
Topic