Posts

I’m currently undertaking a Folger digital fellowship, looking at the media responses and strategies around pandemics in the seventeenth century. Part of the research involves identifying mentions of plague in the abstracts of the English State Papers.

My digital fellowship with the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C is looking at responses to information (and disinformation) found in the the English State Papers and digitised sources held by the library.

The last couple of months have been particularly good ones for anyone working with spatial and historical data: An major new ‘online streetmap’ of early modern Northern Europe, Viabundus, was released at the end of April, about a month after the first CRAN release of an R package called sfnetworks.

Text and Models Digital Humanities is often concerned with creating models of text: a general name for a kind of representation of text which makes it in some way easier to interpret.

Calendars of State Papers and Networking Archives Most of the quantitative research on the Networking Archives project has been using the metadata from the digitised correspondence of State Papers Online.

The Networking Archives project is using tools from other disciplines to write histories of seventeenth-century intelligencing and correspondence. Key in the toolset for the project is network analysis. Network analysis is a suite of tools developed to understand and analyse networks, specifically, network graphs, a formal term for a mathematical graph of entities, known as nodes, connected by vertices, or edges.

This is an R Notebook: a document containing code and text. A live version can be run through MyBinder, which will spin up a copy of R-studio for you to use, and the source code is available on GitHub.