The “New Digital Methods for Understanding The Impacts of Early Women Writers on the Development of Science and Philosophy” project has released the first set of visualizations exploring the roles that women played, and could have played, in early modern scientific discourse.

This project is a London-Boston, collaborative project between Northeastern University London, the PolyGraphs project, the NULab, and the Women Writers Project (the project PIs are Sarah Connell, Julia Flanders, Brian Ball, and Peter West). The project examines and highlights the impacts of early women scientists and natural philosophers on the development of these disciplines during a formative period of the Enlightenment. The project takes Margaret Cavendish’s (1623–1673) engagements with the Royal Society as a case study in the relation between early women’s writing and early institutional science.

As part of this project, the team in London employed network analysis and computer network simulations to evaluate the status of women in early modern intellectual networks. Specifically, the team focused on the relationship between Cavendish and the founding members of the Royal Society. The primary database for this research was the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon Project project. Six Degrees of Francis Bacon is a digital reconstruction of a network consisting of 13,309 ‘nodes’ (i.e., historical figures) and the ‘edges’ that connect them to one another. In turn, the information about these nodes and the edges between them is drawn from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

The visualizations represent two kinds of findings of this networks research. First, findings pertaining to the status of women in the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon network. Second, findings of computer network simulations carried out in order to evaluate the impact of the structure of intellectual networks on the transfer of knowledge.

We will soon release additional text and network visualizations from the project in the WWP Lab, so watch this space!

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