Networks of Analysis: Early Modern British History and the Evolution of Digital Methodology

The seventeenth century in the British Isles, specifically the late seventeenth century, could only be described as chaotic. People witnessed and lived through the accession of a Scottish king, a series of civil wars, the attempt to create a British republic, the restoration of absolutist monarchy, and less that three decades later in 1688 the monarchy came crashing down again to close out the seventeenth century with the ascendancy of representative parliament. Computational analysis aids in the tidiness of this data, specifically network analysis. The recent publication of Tudor Networks and Stanford's Mapping the Republic of Letters project are important contributions to the growing field of network analysis in the early modern world. These datasets have asked important questions about early modern communication systems and social networks. Recently, Networking the Letters of Revolution is a 2024 DH@MSU seed grant funded project. Inspired by more recent developments in the field of network science and early modern studies, Networking is an open access digital repository of code and data specifically related to relationships and networks of people in Scotland during the Revolution. This project is a marriage of early modern Scottish history and computational data science and the visualizations show a story of connectivity over time. Like all digital research, the output for this project has changed from using plug-and-play networking tools like Gephi to using python and coding languages for more accurate output.