Previous NEH-funding made it possible for "Mapping the Republic of Letters" project to develop a series of visualization prototypes to analyze the geographic breadth, historical shape, and social composition of intellectual networks; tools that support a domain expert's capacity to make sense of complexity, rather than relying on automated reasoning. With this project we will develop our most successful visualization techniques to serve historical research with three user groups in mind: 1. Digital humanities scholars with the technical expertise to integrate our code into their own projects and web applications (the "widget" model); 2. Scholars seeking easy upload, exploration, and analysis of historical data sets, without having to touch any code; 3. Early modern scholars who want to use these tools to explore and analyze their own data in the larger context of data already collected for "Mapping the Republic of Letters.
