Analyzing the Republic of Letters

In making my choice for a dataset, my inclination went towards the letters involving women from the period of the early modern era in Florence, Italy because of a connection to the city and country. Florence is really close to me because both of my grandparents lived there for a while. When analyzing these data sets I wanted to view how this particular place was like, not from the viewpoint of people in my textbooks or history class, but from the perspective of those women actually residing and writing from that place. Thus, the dataset would help me resolve a question lingering in my head about whether women were involved in intellectual-political discussions or not.

What was surprising to me in the network visualization is that some of these women turned out to be very connected individuals. It was interesting to see how a lot of them were not only connected to other women, but men as well, who at the time were thought to be more involved with politics. Another fascinating observation I saw was that a lot of the letters sent out were from two of the same people that were connecting back and forth. Could this mean that those people were more connected and talking about more important things than the others?

Taking into consideration the spatial dimension of the data was interesting. My initial impression was that early Italian women had rather limited and localized environments, however the letters prove otherwise. This is because there are letters written by women to people in other cities in Europe. In an era when women could not move as freely as men did, writing a letter became their substitute form of traveling in order to keep relationships with people living farther away than possible and to influence them. The visualization of the data helped me comprehend this better than words alone could do.

Looking at the data over time also made the history feel more real to me. It felt like you could actually see who the letters were going to in real time and how they were interconnected towards one another, Communication was not only a social formality in these women’s lives, but also a tool of remaining close to family and friends and exercising agency in a society that gave them hardly any other means of doing that. This realization is the most valuable insight I gained during analyzing this data.