The Tri-Co Digital Humanities Initiative and the Bryn Mawr College Center for Visual Culture present:

Ruth Ahnert
2015-16 External Faculty Fellow
Stanford Humanities Center
and Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Studies
School of English and Drama
Queen Mary University of London

and

Sebastian Ahnert
Royal Society University Research Fellow
Theory of Condensed Matter (TCM) Group
Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge
and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge

“Tudor Networks of Power: A Digital Project”

Monday, April 11, 4:30 PM
Thomas Library 224, Bryn Mawr College

and

Tuesday, April 12, 12:00 PM
Popular Reading Room, first floor of McCabe Library
Swarthmore College

This project seeks to reconstruct the evidence for Tudor government networks that survives in the state papers archive (now digitized at State Papers Online). By analyzing the metadata from these 132,000 letters, Ruth and Sebastian Ahnert are able both to map the social network implicated in this correspondence, and to measure the relative centrality of each of its members using a range of mathematical tools. These measures enable them to trace large-scale patterns and anomalies, and to identify significant people and bodies of letters within the network requiring closer analysis. In this paper they will discuss both the process behind this large-scale project, and their initial findings.