Visualizing the Republic of Letters

Collaborative experiments that engage computer scientists and humanities scholars in visualizing large-scale historical data sets present rich opportunities both for creating new knowledge in the humanities and for exploring how scholars interpret and use data visualizations. We present visualization tools we created to explore the Electronic Enlightenment [1], a database of thousands of letters exchanged between prominent intellectuals in the 17 and 18 centuries known as the Republic of Letters. We discuss the value of our interdisciplinary collaboration for the historians and computer scientists involved in it.