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UK funding (£144,807): Tudor Networks of Power, 1509-1603 Ukri1 Jan 2015 UK Research and Innovation, United Kingdom
Overview
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Tudor Networks of Power, 1509-1603
| Abstract | 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. |
| Category | Fellowship |
| Reference | AH/M004171/1 |
| Status | Closed |
| Funded period start | 01/01/2015 |
| Funded period end | 30/09/2018 |
| Funded value | £144,807.00 |
| Source | https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FM004171%2F1 |
Participating Organisations
| Queen Mary University of London | |
| UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE | |
| UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE |
The filing refers to a past date, and does not necessarily reflect the current state. The current state is available on the following page: Queen Mary University of London, London.
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