This strand of the project will be led by PI Edelstein who heads the Mapping the Republic of Letters project and the Humanities + Design Lab in Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), in collaboration with Ensor.

Geographic incidence of pirate editions, 1777-1778 (Visualisation produced by Jason Ensor)

The goals of their research will be:

(1) to facilitate digital interoperability between the FBTEE project bibliometric datasets and the Mapping the Republic of Letters datasets on enlightenment correspondence networks and travellers in order to correlate, analyse and explore links between (a) enlightenment print culture and publishing networks and (b) enlightenment social and correspondence networks.

(2) to devise, develop and analyse the complex data visualisations required by the project. The Mapping the Republic of Letters (MRoL) project and Humanities + Design Lab are international leaders in the problems of handling, representing, mapping and visualising complex, uncertain and incomplete digital data. By making interoperable and correlatable the evidence of both FBTEE and MRoL, this project promises to present a dataset more complex than anything they have yet handled.

For more information on the Mapping the Republic of Letters project see: http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/