Using correspondence to underline changes in a historiographical network. Ideas for an inter-archival analysis starting from the correspondence between Armando Sapori, Gino Luzzatto, Roberto S. Lopez and Angelo Sraffa

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze some correspondence exchanges to surface links between recurrent entities found in documents, which form a complex network in which correspondents, books, articles and persons cited in the letters, quoted entities linked to academic world and the documents themselves are linked together. The perspective of the multidimensionality of the environment in which sources are, which is composed by the vertical dimension – the correspondence containing the single documents -– and the horizontal dimension – represented by the links between the vertical dimensions – helps to proceed with the analysis of these inter-archival links. This analysis is made of two levels: the focus on correspondence (distant reading) and then on single document that is part of the correspondence (close reading). The correspondence between Armando Sapori and Gino Luzzatto was the starting point for the creation of the dataset, expanded with documents from correspondences between Roberto Sabatino Lopez and Gino Luzzatto, Armando Sapori and Lopez, Angelo Sraffa and Sapori. The results of network analysis make explicit the connections between the various entities: at the macro level they underline changes over time of correspondence, while at the micro level they highlight links between nodes within individual documents