media
10/03/2021
Jason Heppler
»Tudor Networks visualizes over 123,000 letters from the UK State Papers between the accession of Henry VIII and the death of Elizabeth I. In 2008, the Papers were digitized as the State Papers Online that included metadata fields on sender and recipients, location, and description of the letter contents. With XML donated by Gale, Tudor Networks cleaned, deduplicated, and geo-coded the letters to produce their project. It’s an incredible amount of work. The visualizations and interactive nature of the project work wonderfully. The overview provides readers with a general sense of time and scale — arranging individuals (vertical lines) along an x-axis indicating the average year letters were sent while the y-axis indicates the number of letters sent and received. The result is an effective aggregation of information that otherwise would be difficult to visually discern. This overview graphic alone is arresting — it cleanly indicates periods of intense and growing correspondence. But what makes the project stand out is the network visualizations.«