Locke’s Letters
John Locke was a prodigiously productive correspondent, writing and receiving almost 5000 letters during his lifetime. This project constructs a detailed and enriched personography of his 335 recorded correspondents and a network of their relationships with each other.
This work began when I was a graduate student, under the aegis of the Mapping the Republic of Letters project at Stanford, with Nicole Coleman, Dan Edelstein and others. The metadata on the 335 correspondents, however, is far richer and deeper than I was able to to analyse in the article I wrote as a member of this group.
The data is not, of course, perfect. It is, as you will see, deeply interpretative, as is inevitable. I have left it more or less rough around the edges because by cleaning any more than I have already done, I would be making yet more interpretative decisions that I would rather leave to other scholars. The “notes” column is especially heterogeneous, but that’s fine.
This data is available through the Stanford Digital Repository along with a JSON for use in Palladio and a .gexf file for you to load into Gephi or other preferred network software.
Please see the data ontology here for a full description of the dataset and the interpretative process of its construction. The schema describes the different data and metadata categories in the data set, and details not only the value ranges each field can contain but also some explanations of and justifications for those value ranges and the decisions I made in constructing them. It also includes miscellaneous caveats as to the data's construction. Some of the data is incomplete; I have chosen to leave some data carpentry undone. This will allow other researchers leeway to massage the data into the shapes that best suit their purposes. Since those purposes are as yet unknown, some data fields (dates, for example) are more raw than others.
This schema was compiled with extensive reliance on Electronic Enlightenment, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the journal Locke Studies.