Many contemporary DH
visualizations of historical networks are built on the data amassed in
traditional nineteenth-century collections.
One obvious ideological trait shared by existing data sets and the first
wave of positivist research is their concentration on the “great man,” a vestige of the nineteenth century efforts at
building a literary canon around certain writers. In German, a great deal of information is
centered around Goethe which makes him seem more important than he already was
at the time. We can easily access minute
details about the social life of Frankfurt during the time that he grew up
there, however similar information about daily life in Stuttgart or Hamburg is
less readily available. Stanford’s Republic
of Letters case study of Voltaire states that its visual map shows that only
about 10% of Voltaire’s correspondence, because many of the 19,000 letters
collected do not have precise location references.
The expectation then is that the
network shown is representative of the overall grid. However, European collection building has
always been a tenuous process, often disfigured by war and politics. To what extent can DH projects incorporate
the history of data collection into its own presentations?
When existing visualizations of
the Republic of letters are centered around canonical individuals, they do not
consider the wider European network except as it intersected with
Voltaire. More importantly the history
of archiving is not represented in the map of Voltaire’s correspondences. The
visualization does not show the gaps in the archive the same way that a
temporal organization does. For example,
if there are no letters between certain time periods, this is does not appear in the
visualization. If there are letters
missing—something which a close reading would perhaps more clearly show by the fact that the
collected letters would refer to lost letters, the visualization, as it now
stands, does not. The
visualization does not represent the ideologies of collecting, the influence of
celebrity, personal whim, war, funding, etc. on the accumulation of the
archive. Goethe, not so famously, burned
most his correspondence and diaries related to his father. We can interpret this destruction, but how do we show it on a map?
What we need is an historical understanding
of meta-data’s compilation. How and why
were the letters of Voltaire and Goethe organized into national archives? How can we visualize that which was lost,
forgotten, destroyed? How does digital
humanities examine absence?
