What can visual representations of pre-modern scholarly networks tell us about the scholarly lives of women in the past? Many studies in the last 30 years have established that women were important players in the transatlantic scholarly community (called “the republic of letters”) that united European and American scholars from roughly 1500-1800, before our modern, university-based academic world supplanted it. Stanford’s “Mapping the Republic of Letters” project is mapping some of those major networks to show not just their geographical spread but to suggest how the scholarly networks actually operated: what kinds of people were the major nodes in scholarly networks? What roles did different kinds of people play in transmitting knowledge or connecting scholars? I am currently mapping the correspondence network of Benjamin Franklin, who is notable for including many women in his vast network of correspondents in America, England, and France; he is also infamous for the complicated relationships he had with the many women in his life. But what does his correspondence network look like when sorted by gender? What role did women play in sustaining or promoting Franklin’s learned community? Can visual mapping give us new ways of thinking about past—and present—social and scholarly networks?
Speaker Bio: http://www.stanford.edu/group/gender/People/CarolineWinterer.html
