6  People

6.1 Sample Research Questions

• How did Milton’s place in historical social networks impact his writing?
• What makes a “significant” person in early modern England and how do we identify them?
• How were early modern women instrumental in the creation and maintenance of the Hartlib Circle?

6.2 Tools and Websites

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• Wikidata
• Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
• Tudor Networks of Power
• Women Writers Project
• Book Owners Online
• SlaveVoyages
• Virtual International Authority File
• OpenRefine
• Network Navigator
• Gephi
• Network Analysis in Python

6.3 Activities

6.3.1 Searching for Early Modern People

1. Search for the same person in Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, EarlyPrint Corpus Search, and Tudor Networks of Power. All three of these resources use different sets of data as their starting point and represent that data differently.

2. Cross-check this data in the ODNB, VIAF, and the ESTC. What records can you download from each of these resources?

3. In a text of your choice, search for all the proper nouns using Corpus Search, and download the results. Consider the steps it would take to convert this into a list of names (of people or places).

6.3.2 Network Visualization

1. Choose a person, and export network data from Six Degrees of Francis Bacon.

2. Convert the data to CSV with SDFB-to-CSV.

3. Open the network data in a spreadsheet application (i.e. Excel). How is it organized?

4. Visualize the data in Network Navigator and Gephi.

6.4 References

• Heffernan and Sagner Buurma (2018)
• Quiring (2024)
• Raamsdonk and Ahnert (2022)
• Ahnert and Ahnert (2015)
• Ahnert et al. (2020)
• Ahnert and Ahnert (2019)
• Ladd (2022)
• Greteman (2015)
• Henderson et al. (2012)
• Watts and Strogatz (1998)
• Warren et al. (2016)
• Granovetter (1973)
• Ladd et al. (2017)
• Langmead et al. (2016)
• Gavin (2016)
• Bourke (2017)

Ahnert, Ruth, and Sebastian E. Ahnert. 2015. “Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I: A Quantitative Approach.” ELH 82 (1): 1–1. https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2015.0000.

———. 2019. “Metadata, Surveillance and the Tudor State.” History Workshop Journal 87 (April): 27–51. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dby033.

Ahnert, Ruth, Sebastian E. Ahnert, Catherine Nicole Coleman, and Scott B. Weingart. 2020. The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities. Cambridge UP. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/network-turn/CC38F2EA9F51A6D1AFCB7E005218BBE5.

Bourke, Evan. 2017. “Female Involvement, Membership, and Centrality: A Social Network Analysis of the Hartlib Circle.” Literature Compass 14 (4): n/a–. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12388.

Gavin, Michael. 2016. “Historical Text Networks: The Sociology of Early English Criticism.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 50 (1): 53–80. https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2016.0041.

Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78 (6): 1360–80. https://doi.org/10.1086/225469.

Greteman, Blaine. 2015. “Milton and the Early Modern Social Network: The Case of the Epitaphium Damonis.” Milton Quarterly 49 (2): 79–95. https://doi.org/10.1111/milt.12126.

Heffernan, Laura, and Rachel Sagner Buurma. 2018. “Search and Replace: Josephine Miles and the Origins of Distant Reading.” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, April. https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/search-and-replace.

Henderson, Keith, Brian Gallagher, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Hanghang Tong, Sugato Basu, Leman Akoglu, Danai Koutra, Christos Faloutsos, and Lei Li. 2012. “RolX: Structural Role Extraction &Amp; Mining in Large Graphs.” In Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 1231–39. KDD ’12. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2339530.2339723.

Ladd, John. 2022. “Reassembling the Bacon: Crowdsourcing Historical Social Networks in the Redesign of Six Degrees of Francis Bacon.” In Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities: Volume 2, edited by Aaron Mauro, 169–94. New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8. Iter Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo99702245.html.

Ladd, John, Jessica Otis, Christopher N. Warren, and Scott Weingart. 2017. “Exploring and Analyzing Network Data with Python.” Programming Historian, August. https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/exploring-and-analyzing-network-data-with-python.

Langmead, Alison, Jessica M. Otis, Christopher Warren, Scott B. Weingart, and Lisa D. Zilinkski. 2016. “Towards Interoperable Network Ontologies for the Digital Humanities.” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing,Intl J Humanities & Arts Computing 10 (1): 22–35. https://doi.org/10.3366/ijhac.2016.0157.

Quiring, Ana. 2024. “Fingerprints of British Book History: A Feminist Labor History of EEBO.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 18 (1). https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/18/1/000718/000718.html.

Raamsdonk, Esther van, and Ruth Ahnert. 2022. “John Milton’s Network and the Republic of Letters Renaissance and Reformation.” Renaissance and Reformation 44 (3).

Warren, Christopher N., Daniel Shore, Jessica Otis, Lawrence Wang, Mike Finegold, and Cosma Shalizi. 2016. “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: A Statistical Method for Reconstructing Large Historical Social Networks.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 10 (3). http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/3/000244/000244.html.

Watts, Duncan J., and Steven H. Strogatz. 1998. “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks.” Nature 393 (6684): 440–42. https://doi.org/10.1038/30918.