During the late seventeenth century, the evolution of newsletters and newspapers allowed information to travel more quickly along those networks. Networking the Revolution seeks to add to this conversation in terms of communication during conflict and regime change. The project uses corpuses of letters including: the Leven and Melville Papers, Hamilton Manuscripts, Jacobite Letters, and eventually will also contain letters from military commanders, the plantation committee, and the privy council. Networking seeks to visualize and connect the world of letters, communication, and networks from disparate collections of manuscript and print sources to understand communication patterns and the distribution of information during wartime. By using network analysis, we can uncover the world of the information trade, diplomatic correspondence patterns, and the anomalies. It also helps in prosopographical analysis of the time period, why certain people group together, and understand the dynamics of group identities. This repository allows further access to critical information about seventeenth century British history and this pivotal period which shaped much of the modern British state. Perhaps more importantly, the project democratizes the pursuit of knowledge and expands the potential for research in the field.
Letters are important for more than just their contents. They also have the power to tell us more than just who was writing to who. More importantly, they can tell us who was connected with who, how often letters went missing, the frequency of communication between parties, where networks existed over time and space, and how these evolved over the course of wartime. We seek to develop an open-access project which researchers and the public at large can access to visualize the world of letters in the seventeenth century. Through the wireframing of network analysis, this project hopes to reveal the complex world of communication in late seventeenth century Scotland. The letters exchanged in this period are more than just networks of correspondence; people were bound together through community, print, and dialogue.
The data for the project is in the data folder. If you are going to use the data please cite: Gillian S. Macdonald and M. Fox, "Networking the Revolution, 1688-92, dataset". GitHub Respopsitory, 2025, doi: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14171107