The use of letters as a primary source to answer evidence-based, argument driven historical research questions is nothing new. However, the use of digital quantitative computational methods is something that digital historians have been exploring for the past few decades with increasing success. Using quantitative methods to explore or explain established theories can be valuable in demonstrating the veracity of long held beliefs about historical events as well as finding new patterns with which to explore fresh questions and previously marginalized perspectives. Two such projects that employ this technique are “Where is America in the Republic of Letters?” and “Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I: A Quantitative Approach.” Both projects explore “methodologically innovative” digital scholarship to address historical arguments (Robertson and Mullen 2021).
Mapping the Republic of Letters examines the “major and minor figures in the republic of letters, the international world of learning that spanned the centuries roughly 1400-1800" (Winterer 2021). As a part of this larger project, in “Where is America in the Republic of Letters?” intellectual historian Caroline Winterer hoped to use digital history tools to “shed new light on a person we thought we knew so well” by digitally mapping the letters of Benjamin Franklin to seek “hidden structures” and patterns of Franklin’s intellectual network and his place in the early American intellectual Republic (Winterer 2021). This project used visual cartography early on but realized that these representations were not the most useful way to explore Franklin’s network (Robertson and Mullen 2021). Winterer explains that geographical representations are often historians’ “go-to” for visualizing spatial history, but by using techniques of network mapping, that is visualizing the relationships between people and ideas, she was able to take visual representations of basic quantitative data to learn more about Franklin’s “correspondence networks and how they functioned over time and place...to take the real measure of the role that letters and letter-writers played in the republic of letters” (Winterer 2021).
The research team involved with investigating the letters of Marian era Protestants in “Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I: A Quantitative Approach” did not set out to explore argument driven analysis, but their work to understand the resilience and structure of the Protestant community during the reign of Mary I of England led literary historian Ruth Ahnert and physicist Sebastian Ahnert to uncover data that supported previous scholarship as well as illuminate new questions that could be answered with their data (Ahnert and Ahnert 2015). Examining the letters of Protestants, many of whom were imprisoned and executed in the Marian period, allowed Ahnert and Ahnert to conceptualize the Protestant network and uncover “who the members were and how they related to one another” (Ahnert and Ahnert 2015). Using quantitative network analysis, this project visually mapped the social network of the Protestant community and by using a range of mathematical tools to create a scalable reading, the researchers were able to measure eigenvector centrality, or the “betweenness” of the individuals in the network in relation to a central figure in the network (Ahnert and Ahnert 2015). Their analysis showed that “the robustness of a network relies on figures who encourage high levels of interconnectivity” and that when key players in the community were executed, the network’s connectivity decreased and, in some cases, disappeared completely (Ahnert and Ahnert 2015). This is not to say this is the only finding that came out of this study, indeed, this is only one of many conclusions that Ahnert and Ahnert were able to draw from their analysis. Methodologically, however, they certainly proved that “combining quantitative analysis and ...network analysis as a set of frameworks and methods is compatible with the interests of literary historians” (Ahnert and Ahnert 2015).
Bibliography
Ahnert, Ruth and Sebastian E. Anhert. “Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I: A Quantitative Approach,” ELH 82, no. 1 (2015): 1–33. Annotated in "Models of Argument-Driven Digital History." Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, https://doi.org/10.31835/ma.2021.04
Robertson, Stephen, and Lincoln A. Mullen. “Arguing with Digital History: Patterns of Historical Interpretation,” Journal of Social History 54, no. 4 (2021): 1005–1022. Annotated in "Models of Argument-Driven Digital History." Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, https://doi.org/10.31835/ma.2021.01
Winterer, Caroline. “Where is America in the Republic of Letters,” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 3 (2021): 597–623. Annotated in "Models of Argument-Driven Digital History." Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, https://doi.org/10.31835/ma.2021.11
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