PRINT Dynamic Networks

Lead: Rosalind J. Beiler

PRINT (People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel) is an interdisciplinary and collaborative digital humanities project house at the University of Central Florida. We are tracing the communication networks of early modern European religious minorities including Anabaptists, Quakers, and Pietists to better understand how they influenced migration flows in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on roughly 3,000 letters from several repositories across the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany, the PRINT team is working to create a portal where these historical letters will become accessible to everyone. Researchers will be able to use the portal to create visualizations of the links in the letters, including family relations, religious connections, and cultural ties. Our goal is to connect the past to the present by enabling users to examine early modern people’s mobility, migration, and travel.

PRINT aims to make the letters of religious refugees and missionaries- ordinary early modern people- accessible by creating a portal where users can discover a variety of connections between correspondents and visualize their movements. Working together with the archives that hold the original documents, and through engagement with citizen scholars in transcribing and translating the correspondence, PRINT will allow individuals to visualize a variety of networks and read the original sources behind these visualizations.

Our goals are to:

Visualize the continuously changing communication networks that are revealed in the letters to understand how these ties between religious groups influenced the migration patterns of this period.
Utilize the Zooniverse platform for crowdsourcing the transcriptions and translations, creating an easily accessible digital collection.
Harness the power of the Zooniverse platform for crowdsourcing the transcriptions and translation.
Develop open-sources tools that connect these network visualizations to the correspondence database.
Make PRINT a repository of historical information for researchers and the general public.

We have created a prototype visualization of communication lines displayed on a period map.