State Papers Visual Search

This application is designed as a way to make searching through a very large mass of documents (the 170,000 letters of the Stuart State Papers) for relevant results easier. Users can enter a keyword in the search bar, which displays a small bar chart of ‘hits’ for that term per year.

Clicking and dragging on a year range on that bar chart displays geographic hits, for that period, in a miniature map in another window. Finally, the user draws a shape (either a polygon or rectangle) on the map, which displays all letters with the selected parameters as a network diagram in the main viewing pane.

Clicking on an ‘edge’ (a line denoting a letter sent between two individuals) displays all the relevant letters in date order, along with their brief descriptions from the Calendars of State Papers.