Mapping the Republic of Letters is a project by Stanford University in partnership with Oxford University and several research institutions to quantify and visualize scholarly networks in the early-modern period. Because of the size of the project it is difficult to produce any network description of an entire career or era with completion. For example, the project attempted to map Benjamin Franklin’s letters, correspondence and travel for the entire length of his life but were overwhelmed by the sheer number of material. Instead, they focused on the years between 1756 and 1762 which was a formative period in Franklin’s life. The researchers focused their efforts on meta-data based on date, location to map Franklin’s map of correspondence. By showing location of origin and date of all of Franklin’s letters one could start to see patterns. Most of Franklin’s letters were from Continental Europe and especially England in addition to America, the mapping of this data revealed the transmission of ideas and Franklin’s own inner changes as well as his influence on others. The website allows users to gain a deeper insight into the project and its findings by looking a several case studies of publication, travel and correspondence of ten leading scholars of the early-modern era.
