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Tudor Networks of Power
Ruth Ahnert, Sebastian E. Ahnert
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R1,127
Discovery Miles 11 270
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Tudor Networks of Power is the product of a groundbreaking
collaboration between an early modern book historian and a
physicist specializing in complex networks. Together they have
reconstructed and computationally analysed the networks of
intelligence, diplomacy, and political influence across a century
of Tudor history (1509-1603), based on the British State Papers.
The 130,000 letters that survive in the State Papers from the Tudor
period provide crucial information about the textual organization
of the social network centred on the Tudor government. Whole
libraries have been written using this archive, but until now
nobody has had access to the macroscopic tools that allow us to ask
questions such as: What are the reasons for the structure of the
Tudor government's intelligence network? What was it geographical
reach and coverage? Can we use network data to show patterns of
surveillance? What role did women play in these government
networks? And what biases are there in the data? The authors employ
methods from the field of network science, translating key concepts
and approaches into a language accessible to literary scholars and
historians, and illustrating them with examples drawn from this
fantastically rich archive. Each chapter is the product of a set of
thematically organized 'experiments', which show how particular
methods can help to ask and answer research questions specific to
the State Papers archive, but also have applications for other
large bodies of humanities data. The fundamental aim of this book,
therefore, is not merely to provide an innovative perspective on
Tudor politics; it also aspires to introduce an entirely new
audience to the methods and applications of network science, and to
suggest the suitability of these methods for a range of humanistic
inquiry.
We live in a networked world. Online social networking platforms
and the World Wide Web have changed how society thinks about
connectivity. Because of the technological nature of such networks,
their study has predominantly taken place within the domains of
computer science and related scientific fields. But arts and
humanities scholars are increasingly using the same kinds of visual
and quantitative analysis to shed light on aspects of culture and
society hitherto concealed. This Element contends that networks are
a category of study that cuts across traditional academic barriers,
uniting diverse disciplines through a shared understanding of
complexity in our world. Moreover, we are at a moment in time when
it is crucial that arts and humanities scholars join the critique
of how large-scale network data and advanced network analysis are
being harnessed for the purposes of power, surveillance, and
commercial gain. This title is also available as Open Access on
Cambridge Core.
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