The Republic of Letters, an intellectual network initially based on the writing and exchange of letters, was a pre-disciplinary community in which most of the modern disciplines developed. It was the ancestor to a wide range of intellectual societies from the seventeenth-century salons and eighteenth-century coffeehouses to the scientific academy or learned society and the modern research university.
In 2008, with the receipt of a grant from the Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities, a group of Stanford faculty, led by Dan Edelstein and Paula Findlen, and including Keith Baker, John Bender, Giovanna Ceserani, Jessica Riskin, and Caroline Winterer began Mapping the Republic of Letters to piece together a vision of the Republic of Letters that spans many centuries and continents. This interdisciplinary project has since grown to include a network of scholars at other institutions and a number of different data sets, capturing information about travel, correspondence, and libraries in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Enlightenment, which you can view online.
With the help of the Stanford Humanities Center's Academic Technology Specialist, Nicole Coleman, and the Tooling Up for Digital Histories Spatial History Project at Stanford, the team has begun processing and visualizing this data.
One example of this effort is an interactive visualization of correspondence from the Electronic Enlightenment, which you can view online. Though still in its early stages, this opportunity to see entire correspondence collections mapped across the globe and across time makes possible a clearer understanding of how shifts in knowledge-centers occurred and encourages further explorations into how to visualize the exchange of ideas and information in the Republic of Letters to help us understand its significance in connecting people across time and space.
