Enfilade

This video shows advances made by the Electronic Enlightenment’s Mapping the Republic of Letters Project, a fascinating collaboration between various institutions and scholars, which aims to investigate the ‘social network’ of the eighteenth century. Using new technologies such as geographical imaging, the project has created numerous maps of the correspondence of the Republic of Letters, which can be analysed, compared and contrasted. – FG

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From the Electronic Enlightenment Website:

Digging into Enlightenment: Mapping the Republic of Letters

An exciting collaboration between the Electronic Enlightenment Project (University of Oxford) and the Mapping the Republic of LettersProject (Stanford University) with participation of Chris Weaver at the University of Oklahoma.

This initiative involves mining and interpreting details relating to locations drawn from Electronic Enlightenment‘s corpus of 58,776 letters and documents from the long 18th century. The international project team will explore ways to visualize and annotate these relationships, developing sophisticated new tools to map and explore the complex geographical interconnections between these tens of thousands of letters to and from forty countries across Europe, Asia, and North and South America that can be found in the EE collection.