The datasets underlying this network analysis were generated through searches of the Early Modern Letters Online database. View the dataset on men corresponding with women as a CSV here; on women corresponding with men as a CSV here; and women corresponding with women as a CSV here.

So this data set is based off of the letters that were sent either in, from or to Spain, that included women of course. The idea behind choosing what I wanted to use as my dataset was mainly how long did it take for women in Spain to make society comfortable with them sending letters? And so with that I had to choose a dataset in Spain with a decent amount of range in the years and so that is how I came to choose this dataset.

When it comes to what type of research question this dataset could answer, a few questions come to mind “When did women start sending letters in Spain?” or “When did women gain confidence to start sending/receiving letters in great quantities?”. I believe this dataset can be used to help answer both of these questions or at least help the argument.

Now, for this specific dataset, when asked what does it show in terms of the role that women played in early moderm Republic Letters I would say is that they helped pioneer women’s involvement in said modern Republic Letters. The oldest letter in this dataset was in 1524, which is half a millenium ago, plus two years, which shows that women participating in letters has been occuring for a while, and these women were probably some of the first to do so. With their help, society definitely got comfortable with womens involvement in such areas, even if it took very very long.

When it comes to visualizing relationships accros space and time, it helps to make it clear how letter writing connected people in that early modern Europe era. Instead of individual letters, with the network, we can see a whole network of communication and how its ideas were shared between different people and places. This makes it easier to understand that letter writing wasn’t random, but actually had purpose, whether it was to build connections between individuals or maybe even nations, depending on who sent/received the letter.