Tudor Networks

[matthberg]

A striking yet somewhat confusing way to visualize this data. With the X axis being the average year of all letters sent by a person, interpreting the distance between corespondents is somewhat challenging. It's hard to know how a line from someone averaging around 1575 to someone around 1530 should be interpreted, since their letters aren't exactly time traveling. The difference could be explained by relative ages, yet I reckon there are other interesting factors to consider (corresponding with one set of people early in life, changing to another with age possibly). The timeline you get by clicking on "Explore by time" provides some more data, yet it isn't quite clear 100% there either.

[tmrtsmith]

The Tudor government maintained a communication network that criss-crossed the globe. This visualisation brings together 123,850 letters connecting 20,424 people from the United Kingdom’s State Papers archive, dating from the accession of Henry VIII to the death of Elizabeth I (1509-1603). On this page we can see all people who sent or received letters from two or more people, arranged chronologically left-to-right.

[StanislavPetrov]

Really fascinating project. Impressed by the amount of research that it must have taken to put this together.

[sva_]

That is a very beautiful graph, especially if you click on a node.

[masswerk]

Indeed, very Tufte-esque.

[threshold]

Isn’t this metadata from bulk surveillance?

[detaro]

> If you want to find out more about the team’s work on the application of network analysis to the State Papers, see their articles Metadata, Surveillance, and the Tudor State, and A Tale of Two Snowdens: Dataveillance in History

That's the point apparently.

[shatnersbassoon]

Thomas Cromwell was the most prominent spymaster of Tudor times and letters to him feature heavily here. So not all of it is bulk surveillance, some of it seems to be old-fashioned human intelligence gathering.

[qualudeheart]

Literal 1984.