The above image comes from the digital humanities project “Mapping the Republic of Letters,” which maps using networks the correspondence during and study of the Republic of Letters, an international intellectual group of the Enlightenment. The project was led by faculty of the Stanford Humanities Center, with supporting funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional research partners came from the University of Oxford, Groupe D’Alembert, the Huygens Institute, and the DensityDesign Research Lab.
The site contains a number of case studies into the correspondences of major Enlightenment figures. Many of the online maps are not working correctly right now, but many are backed up on GitHub, such as these files containing the correspondence network of John Locke.
The lead photo, though, is what I will be looking at in-depth, because it conveys a lot of information yet is not all that comprehensible. A high-res version can be found here. This panoramic network visualization connects current scholars studying the Enlightenment with their fellow scholars as well as their research subjects.
There are three different types of Nodes. The first are the modern scholars, with different symbols denoting their status as faculty members, featured researchers, or “other” researchers and collaborators. The second type of Node are the subjects of their studies, the major figures of Enlightenment thought. The third type of Node are the projects on which the modern scholars collaborated, color coded by type. The edges connecting the nodes represent the relationships between these people and each other or the projects.
These relationships being depicted as edges are categorized as either a project affiliation or a connection to partners or events. These relationship types are differentiated in the visualization as dashed and solid lines, respectively. If two researchers collaborated on a project or attended a conference on a particular thinker, that thinker and the researchers are all connected to and through the project. If one researcher specializes in one Enlightenment figure, the two nodes are also directly linked. Essentially, any Nodes related through scholarly work are linked.
The color-coded projects Nodes are all numbered sequentially. Their number is determined by the dates they were undertaken, visualized on a timeline at the bottom of the panorama.
The visualization does not allow for much interaction. It is a static image; the only thing a user can do, really, is zoom in or out. This lack of interaction, combined with the mass of pictures, detail, and color, makes it a hard visualization to digest and a difficult one to understand. The key is very small in the bottom left corner; the node symbols and edge connections don’t feel immediately obvious or intuitive; and, although the modern scholarship is really what I think is being displayed here, the looming size of Enlightenment figures gives them a far greater position in the panorama’s visual hierarchy. This makes it seem like what is actually being visualized is the Republic of Letters, not scholarship on the Republic of Letters. So, while the image is eye-catching and information-packed, I did not find it to effectively convey that information to the viewer.
