Visualizing the Paston Letters Network

Visualizing the Paston Letters Network displays the network generated between letter writers and recipients from the Paston Letters and Documents collection. This collection contains primary sources from the Paston family, a fifteenth-century gentry family from Norfolk, England. The material for this project came from Norman Davies’ edition of Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, which was digitized by the University of Michigan. It was scraped and initially cleaned using Python, then cleaned up further using OpenRefine, and finally visualized in Gephi. The website for this project contains some background information on the Paston family, the visualization of their letter network, commentary on trends found through the network visualization, and the methodology for this project.

For more information about the Pastons and their letter and other documents collection, read this blog post from the British Library.