The goal of the project is to begin to reconstruct with some granularity the lively printing and publishing world of Early Modern London with a group of undergraduate students. Authors like Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson did not work in isolation, but they were members of an active and competitive commercial community–ranging from the authors themselves, to the printers, to the book sellers, and to the final audience of their works. At each step of this commercial chain, personal and professional relationships helped to shape the production and markets for the authors’ works.
This project aims to explore ways to make this historical context much more alive to undergraduate students while, at the same time, experiment with ways to include computational methodologies in undergraduate, humanities education. The existence of ready-to-use tools for Social Network Visualization and Analysis, such as Gephi, as well as powerful packages in R and Python, created the opportunity to work hand-in-hand with a small group of student-researchers to attempt to study these literary networks.
In addition, one of the pedagogical benefits that this project demonstrated for me is that students started to visualize the specific details of at least a slice of life in 17th century London. Places mentioned in plays, for example, or even simply on the publication information of a book from the period became more alive and detailed to them.
