Tudor Networks of Power, 1509-1603

We live in a networked world. The Internet, public transport networks, and power grids make our everyday lives possible; our careers are dependent on 'networking' with influential people; and social networking sites provide an online account of our social capital. Networks are also a burgeoning area of academic study: the past decade has seen the emergence and rapid growth of research into so-called complex networks. This is a highly interdisciplinary field, based on the discoveries by Albert-László Barabási, Reka Albert, Duncan J. Watts and Steven Strogatz in the late 1990s, who showed that real-world networks (such as, for example, neural networks, transport networks, biological regulatory networks and social networks) share similar organizational characteristics and can be analysed using the same computational tools and models. This project aims to apply these quantitative methods to the study of Tudor politics. Through collaboration with an expert in the field of complex networks - Dr Sebastian Ahnert (Royal Society University Research Fellow, Department of Physics, Cambridge) - this project will reconstruct and analyse the networks of political power in Tudor England by mining the correspondence available through State Papers Online (SPO).

Quantitative network analysis provides a valuable way of mapping and understanding the mass of political exchanges that make up the archive of Tudor state papers. For the Tudor period SPO collects together approximately 790,000 pages of manuscripts (in over 325,000 separate documents), a high proportion of which are letters. Network analysis can provide a navigable overview of such an archive: by stripping down the letters to their basic meta-data (sender, recipient, date, etc.), we are able both to visually map the social network implicated in this correspondence, and to measure the relative centrality of each of its members using a range of different mathematical tools. The result is the kind of birds-eye view that will allow us to understand the various factors affecting the shape of this archive, from large-scale political change, to changes in filing procedure. Such an overview, therefore, acts to direct our attention to significant people and bodies of letters that may merit closer examination. In other words, network analysis provides valuable navigation for close reading.

This project has two main outputs: a monograph and an interactive network visualization web-tool. The monograph will function as an introduction to the field of network analysis for those in the broad field of arts and humanities, providing a model of how to integrate quantitative findings into traditional forms of publication. The chapters will be structured in terms of network properties and analytical tools, examining hubs and connectors, network infrastructure, community detection algorithms, network evolution and robustness. The web-tool is designed as a resource to help people from a variety of backgrounds to navigate the important archive of Tudor political correspondence in order to identify new projects and stories yet to be told. Together, these outputs seek to demonstrate how network analysis can transform the way we engage with digitized archives.

The project will also seek to foster future partnerships and to identify uses for the dataset, the web-tool, and our analytical methods. The National Archives (NA) have already signaled their interest in our web-tool and the way the technology behind it could be harnessed to provide innovative alternatives to traditional catalogues and finding aids for collections within their archives (see letter of support). Along with potential users from within academia, the creative industries, archives and libraries, representatives from the NA will be invited to a workshop where we will gain feedback on our tool, explore ways of promoting it, and discuss future projects and collaborations.

The project's impact beyond academia will be primarily through the interactive network visualization web-tool, and the technology behind it. The web-tool provides a way of opening up an ancient archive to new eyes by helping people to identify their own projects. Network visualization, more generally, has the potential to offer various sectors a new way of interacting with historical data. We have identified four main groups of beneficiaries of the web-tool and network visualization technology, and we will bring together representatives from these groups at a project workshop (see Pathways to Impact):

1) The National Archives and other archives, libraries and collections.
The NA archives have written in support of this project because they stand to benefit from the development of our web-tool in two ways. Firstly, it will create more demand for access to the state papers, both via the microfilms held at the NA (the original manuscripts have restricted access due to their fragility), and via State Papers Online (which will bring them additional revenue). Secondly, they are interested in the way network visualization technology could be employed as an innovative alternative to traditional catalogues and finding aids for their collections. The NA is currently considering the future of its digitization policy; one of the NAs key Collaborative Doctoral Award Research Priorities is to address challenges in identifying and linking individuals across multiple series of digital datasets. This project has the potential to help them do that, and in so doing produce technology that will benefit other archives, libraries, museums and galleries. Accordingly, I am currently in discussion with the NA about putting together a CDA application with them.

2) The creative industries.
The tool can be used to identify untold stories, hidden in the archives. This feature can be used to help novelists, dramatists and performers, researchers for TV and radio, and other professional story-tellers develop narratives, plots and programmes. We will identify suitable representatives to attend our workshop with the help of CreativeWorks London, which is based at Queen Mary and administrated from within my department (the School of English and Drama). Specifically, we are in conversation with CreativeWorks' Prof. Mark D'Inverno (Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, where S. Ahnert is also a Visiting Fellow), who has championed interdisciplinary research and teaching at the intersection between computing and the creative industries; he has suggested leads we might follow up with the director, designer and choreographer Melly Still.

3) Gale (Cengage Learning).
Gale is the company behind SPO. By making their database more easily navigable, new users will have reason to subscribe, make use of existing institutional subscriptions, or to petition their institutions to sign up for this resource. Gale will therefore benefit financially from sharing their XML data with us (see Technical Plan), as well as seeing increased web-traffic to their site.

4) iWakari
iWakari will be designing our web-tool using their KNALIJ web application, which they developed to address the challenges and opportunities posed by big data. By working with us they will gain insights into the way that network visualization could be harnessed to provide innovative alternatives to traditional catalogues and finding aids for collections within archives, libraries, museums and galleries. This could mean valuable future contracts for iWakari.

In addition, our project will make the state papers archive approachable to members of the general public with an interest in accessing and interpreting historical archives, both directly through the web-tool, and indirectly through any creative outputs that might be produced by beneficiaries from group 2.