On 2-3 September 2013, Wai-te-ata Press hosted the two-day digital history hackfest “Visualising Correspondence Networks” at Victoria University of Wellington. The event was sponsored by the Victoria University Research Fund.

The recent availability of digitized letters, diaries, and journals has opened the door to new ways of data-mining, analyzing and visualizing the often complex, multi-person, multi-sited social networks embedded in texts. This two-day event explored the field of network analysis as it relates to historic correspondence.

Around thirty people attended, and participants included historians, computer scientists, and professionals from the cultural heritage sector. The event enabled participants to identify common challenges and opportunities, share knowledge, and learn new skills.

Day one surveyed a number of issues and approaches including data preparation, an introduction to out-of-the-box and bespoke tools, and a demonstration of exemplar projects. Day two was the hackfest, bringing computer science experts together with historians and cultural heritage specialists to work on specific projects developed in a small team environment.

Some of the key takeaways from the event were:

• The value of collaboration, and working as a cross-discipline team
• Translating knowledge across disciplines is possible but it takes time
• The importance of approaching data with a clear research question
• Greater understanding of data cleaning and entity extraction
• Most popular tool: Open Refine (formerly Google Refine), which is a tool for working with messy data, cleaning it, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases.

For more information about projects, tools and presentations, please visit the Digital History blog.

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