[D66] Six Degrees of Voltaire

[J.N.]

http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2016/summer/feature/six-degrees-voltaire-how-computer-code-developed-study-the-enlightenment-connected-the-panama-pap

Feature
Six Degrees of Voltaire: How Computer Code Developed to Study the
Enlightenment Is Connected to the Panama Papers

By Jennifer Howard | HUMANITIES, Summer 2016 | Volume 37, Number 3

    An image of Voltaire’s correspondence as visualized by Mapping the
Republic of Letters' RPLVIZ tool.

    —Courtesy of Mapping the Republic of Letters with data provided by
Electronic Enlightenment Project.

August 15, 2016

What does the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire have in common with
Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, until recently the prime minister of
Iceland? Though a world apart in time and occupation, the philosophe and
the politician have had their social networks probed and illuminated by
different iterations of the same software tools.

Created to help advance humanities research, those tools are enjoying a
second, journalistic life beyond the academy. In an era besotted by big
data, they’re staking out a middle ground between algorithmic analysis
and close reading.

Voltaire plays a starring role in Mapping the Republic of Letters, a
digital-humanities project that uses letters to trace social and
geographical connections among writers and thinkers active in European
intellectual circles in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Gunnlaugsson
is one of the so-called Power Players in the investigative journalistic
juggernaut known as the Panama Papers, billed as the largest data leak
in history.

Both sets of investigations—one academic, one journalistic—rely on the
ability to make narrative sense out of large amounts of raw material.
For Mapping the Republic of Letters, that includes the Electronic
Enlightenment, a University of Oxford collection of more than 53,000
letters to and from Voltaire, Rousseau, and many other Enlightenment
figures of great and lesser prominence. The Panama Papers project,
coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists, or ICIJ, has recruited journalists from many countries and
news outlets to dig into 11.5 million financial and legal records from a
major offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca.

...