Drawing Networks in the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17492): Toward Visualizing a Writing Community's Shared Apprenticeship, Social Valuation, and Self-Validation

Abstract

At the 2005 Josephine Roberts’ Memorial Panel, sponsored by the Renaissance English Text Society, Jonathan Gibson’s paper “Anne Southwell and the Construction of MS Folger V.b.198” introduced a considerable amount of new, important, and difficult-to-synthesise information about this miscellany and its composition, both physical and authorial. At one point during the paper, a brief aside about the difficulty of rendering information of this sort — information about the way in which physical and authorial space interacted in the manuscript — introduced a few slides containing a newer, visual way of considering a fair bit of complex information of this sort. For several of us in the room at the time, Gibson’s aside about the difficulty associated with conveying such representation (and his solution), resonated significantly, and well beyond. The work we present in this paper has its roots in this resonance and, indeed, will eventually discuss one result of our experimentation in the conveyance of such information in the course of our exploration of the Devonshire MS (BL Add Ms 17492). This paper appears in three parts: one along the lines of traditional work in the field of textually-oriented Renaissance literary studies; one that will merge this traditional approach with that of the computing humanist, with discussion of the visualization of the scribal interaction data we present; and one, as an addendum, that provides the technical details of our experimentation, for those who might wish to reproduce or duplicate elements of it.