These visualisations use a variety of open-source libraries, including Leaflet, Exhibit, JQuery, D3, Dimple, and Sigmajs, but have been chosen and tailored specifically for spatial, temporal and personal attributes. While these technologies are open-source, they have been adapted and developed for the specific purposes of this site by Niall O'Leary. The letters metadata used is drawn from a wide range of sources, both online and collected in books. Where links to letters exist, I have tried to provide this (you can explore individual letters via the 'Search' option and through the 'Letters' link in the menu). These visualisations use only metadata - sender, recipient, place of origin, destination, date. No letter content has been used.
Einstein's written legacy is comprised of more than 30,000 unique documents. Princeton University are publishing these as The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein and making them available on an open-access site, The Digital Einstein Papers. It is a enormous undertaking, but one that already has published 13 volumes. The letters indexed here are drawn from Volume 12 of this edition.
Diana Kormos Buchwald, Ze'ev Rosenkranz, Tilman Sauer, József Illy & Virginia Iris Holmes, ed., The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 12: The Berlin Years: Correspondence, January-December 1921. Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 2009
Alfred Russel Wallace is famous for developing the theory of Evolution independently of Charles Darwin. However, the two were frequent correspondents as can be seen in this selection of letters drawn from the two volume, 'Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences' by James Marchant.
Marchant, J., Alfred Russel Wallace; Letters and Reminiscences. London & New York: Cassell and Co. 2 vols, 1916.
The Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project, currently based at the Natural History Museum, London, aims to locate, digitize, transcribe and interpret the surviving correspondence and manuscripts of the great 19th century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913). Volunteers are transcribing these documents and work is on-going. The sheer range of Wallace's correspondents is staggering and testifies to his huge influence on the scientific and cultural community of his time and our modern world.
Letters have been drawn from a number of different sources for this collection, principally:
Unfortunately there are relatively few letters to Ambrose Bierce himself.
For mapping purposes, more than 99% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
There are many thousands of American Civil War letters online and archived. Metadata is relatively difficult to compile though without immense manual effort. Thankfully Hamilton College in New York is developing an excellent resource in their Civil War Letters project, an exceptional case study in the use of Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards too.
A formidable Elizabethan figure, Bess of Hardwick figured prominently in the politics and social life of her time. The Bess of Hardwick's Letters website was developed by The University of Glasgow with technical development provided by The Humanities Research Institute at The University of Sheffield. It is a rich archive of her correspondence and paints a rich picture of her times. I have drawn on this website for the data displayed here.
For mapping purposes, 100% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
The Carl Maria von Weber – Collected Works (WeGA) website was developed by WeGA, a venture funded by the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur (Mainz). It aims to develop a complete scholarly edition of all Weber’s works, both musical and literary in time for his 200th birthday in 2026. They have already achieved a great deal publishing over 5000 of his letters. My sincere thanks to Peter Stadler at the Musicology Seminar Detmold/Paderborn for all his help with this collection. Peter is working on expanding TEI to document the very features of correspondence that this site uses. Check out the correspSearch project to see some exciting work in this area.
The documents of this small collection of private letters were written in the Caribbean area (most from Puerto Rico) to Spain in 1823, at a crucial moment of both Spanish and history in both hemispheres: In Spain, France invaded the Peninsula to restore absolutistic rule, in the Caribbean, Colombian forces besieged and eventually took the last Spanish footholds on the mainland. The letters were all sent on the same ship and to all probability used by new absolutist authorities for intelligence gathering and political prosecution. The authors and recipients of the letters have no immediate relationship to each other, which makes the contents a singularly rich peek into very different realities of life at that moment.
Check out the project website.
Charles Darwin was a prolific letter writer and received a great deal of correspondence in return. There are over 15000 letters available on the Darwin Correspondence Project website, a project jointly managed by the American Council of Learned Societies and the University of Cambridge. This is a wonderful resource with full texts of most of the letters available to read online.
It should be stressed that all data coming from this site was harvested in an automated way, so there are issues to bear in mind:
Firstly I am augmenting the data with my own. For instance, unfortunately for the purposes of this site, the metadata did not include destinations for the letters. To capture this I developed a program to extrapolate destinations based on the locations of the recipients as letter writers themselves. If a letter was sent by someone who became a recipient in turn, the origin of their letter was used as a destination for the letter they received, provided their own letter was sent 46 days either side of their receiving a letter, and where possible using their most recent location temporally speaking. There are obviously implications for the authenticity of the data using such a strategy.
Secondly I am not taking a live feed from the Darwin website. Metadata was collected in February 2015. The Darwin website is constantly being updated so my site may not have all the data currently there.
Thirdly some issues may arise in the use of the 'Search' on my site. Unlike a site dedicated to the individual subject such as the Darwin Correspondence Project, I do not have the resources to account for ambiguity in terms of subject's names etc. (at least at this stage). By this I mean that a user of my site must use the exact name they are searching for rather than a variant. For example, while 'A. R. Wallace' or 'Wallace, A. R.' may yield results in the search, 'Alfred Russel Wallace' may not. In this respect it is better to search for the more generic 'Wallace'. The search will then try to find all names that include 'Wallace'.
Lastly the size of the collection poses something of a problem, so I have split it into two. Any letters without a year will be found in the first block 'Charles Darwin Correspondence 1821-1868'. Obviously to see all letters just select both halves in the select box, though again the number of letters can cause problems for some visualisations.
For mapping purposes, 89% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
This collection has been drawn from The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, vol. i, 1792–1814, (8 vols 1972–80) edited by M. O’Connell, 1973, and available online on the website of the Irish Manuscripts Commission. This data was manually collected through study of the volume, but is only a small taster of correspondence that stretches to eight volumes.
For mapping purposes, more than 99% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
The Royal Irish Academy's Documents on Irish Foreign Policy provides a fascinating insight into the political decisions that shaped modern Ireland. From the foundation of the state to its adoption of neutrality during the Second World War, these documents provide a real insight into the motivations behind some of the most controversial events in Irish history. Using a semi-automated approach, only what I have identified as correspondence has been harvested for this site and only documents from 1919 to 1941, volumes 1 to 6.
For mapping purposes, almost 100% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
A signatory of the Irish Proclamation, executed for his leading role in the Easter Rising 1916, Éamonn Ceannt (Edward Kent) was also passionate about Irish culture. His wife, Áine (Frances Mary O’Brennan), an active member of Cumann na mBan, also played a vital role in the Rising, as indeed did her sisters Kathleen and Lily. Beyond their roles in that tumultuous time, however, their cultural impact on Irish society and letters in the early years of the Irish State is also inestimable. These letters are drawn from the National Library of Ireland, and paint a fascinating picture of how these people helped found and then shape the Irish nation.
At the centre of America's cultural life through much of the Twentieth Century, Elia Kazan was a director of stage and screen, famous for films such as 'On the Waterfront', 'A Steetcar Named Desire' and 'East of Eden'. His work brought him close to such influential writers as Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck, and Arthur Miller, and actors such as Marlon Brando, James Dean and Robert De Niro. His complicity with the House Un-American Activities Committee has made him a controversial figure to this day. These letters are drawn from:
Albert J. Devlin and Marlene J. Devlin, ed., The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
For mapping purposes, 99% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
This is a relatively small collection of papers relating to the French novelist at Brown University Library. As with Lovecraft's correspondence (see below), I am extracting metadata from a finding aid, but in this instance there is no destination available, even when extrapolated from origins.
For mapping purposes, 100% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
Ernest Hemingway was a giant of Twentieth Century literature. He also lived a larger than life existence that rivaled anything in his stories and which brought him into contact with a wide variety of influential figures. His letters are a vibrant insight into his world, and by extension, our world.
The metadata used here is drawn from The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum website, specifically as it relates to their vast collection of Ernest Hemingway papers. As with Lovecraft's correspondence (see below), I am extracting metadata from a finding aid, but in this instance there is little destination data available. At present I am only dealing with his outgoing letters, but I hope to index his incoming correspondence soon.
Drawn from the book:
D. D. Paige, ed., The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941. London : Faber and Faber, 1951.
Drawn from the book:
Forrest Read, ed., Pound/Joyce: the letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound's essays on Joyce. London, Faber, 1968
Co-authors of 'The Communist Manifesto' and lifelong fiends, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were huge figures in 19th Century political and economic thought and have had a profound impact on the modern world. For these letters, I have drawn metadata from the letters volumes from, 'The Collected Works of Marx and Engels', a 50 volume survey of their works.
This dataset is predominantly derived from Letters of Henrik Ibsen, by Henrik Ibsen, John Nilsen Laurvik, 1905. Unfortunately this volume only features letters written by Ibsen and few destinations are available. I have augmented this selection with three letters related to James Joyce's interaction with the playwright.
For mapping purposes, 100% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
One of the Twentieth Century's most influential writers of horror fiction, H. P. Lovecraft was also a prolific letter writer. According to S.T. Joshi, Lovecraft wrote over 100,000 letters in his lifetime, communicating with some of the leading lights in American weird fiction. Using Brown University Library's finding aid as a basis, I have compiled details on over 3,700 letters to and from Lovecraft.
For mapping purposes, 100% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
This dataset is derived from Official Correspondence relating to the Peace Negotiations June-September, 1921, on University College Cork's excellent CELT: The Corpus of Electronic Texts resource. While relatively small in number, these letters testify to the tense situation between Ireland and Great Britain preparatory to the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations later in 1921.
Tim McLoughlin's The Correspondence of James Barry at the National University of Ireland, Galway, uses TEI to document all the known correspondence of the Irish painter James Barry (1741-1806). It is a snapshot of Irish and British cultural life in the latter half of the Eighteenth Century.
For mapping purposes, almost 100% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
Between comrades: James Connolly, letters and correspondence, 1889–1916, Donal Nevin (ed.), is a wonderful collection of letters centering on the Irish Socialist revolutionary, James Connolly. Metadata has been captured through study of this book and as such it is very much a work in progress with only 130 pages of letters, from a book of nearly 900 pages, captured.
For mapping purposes, almost 100% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
James Joyce is a giant of Twentieth Century Literature, indeed World Literature in general. He also wrote a great deal of correspondence, communicating with many of his literary contemporaries (for instance, Eliot, Pound, and Fitzgerald). The letters brought together here have been compiled from a variety of sources, though principally the three volumes of letters collected by Stuart Gilbert and subsequently Richard Ellmann:
A small number were drawn from Selected Letters of James Joyce. Edited by Richard Ellmann, London: Faber & Faber, 1975, while over three hundred have been drawn from the National Library of Ireland's Collections The James Joyce - Paul Léon Papers, 1930-1940 and Hans E. Jahnke Bequest at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation online at the National Library Of Ireland, 2014.
These letters appear in Trinity College Dublin's Digital Collections (© The Board of Trinity College Dublin). I have tried to include all correspondence relating to John Millington Synge, author of Playboy of the Western World, basing my selection on the Library's own categorisation of their documents.
The LETTERS AND TEXTS: INTELLECTUAL BERLIN AROUND 1800 website deals with scholars, writers both male and female, and publishers in public life in Berlin around 1800. Much of the letters in this project are also available in the correspSearch project, a project exploring the use of TEI for letters.
For mapping purposes, 100% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
Drawn from the book:
Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, ed., The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Vol. 1, 1898–1922. London: Faber and Faber, 2011.
The Mark Twain Project Online is one of the foremost digital critical editions available online. It is attempting to put everything written by Mark Twain online, and this includes over 30,000 letters. As in the Charles Darwin Correspondence project, the destination of the letters is not documented. Again I have had to extrapolate destinations based on the origins of other letters. The size of the collection too poses something of a problem, so I have split it into four blocks. Any letters without a year will be found in the first block 'Mark Twain Letters 1830-1878'. Obviously to see all letters just select all four blocks in the select box, though again the number of letters can cause problems for some visualisations.
Before 1916, Padraig Pearse was an educational innovator, a writer, a powerful orator and advocate of the Irish language. After 1916 he became synonymous with the Easter Rising that led to Ireland's independence. Some of his correspondence is available on the National Library of Ireland website, but these letters are drawn from:
Séamus Ó Buachalla, ed., The letters of P.H. Pearse. Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Smythe, 1980.
These Spanish and Portuguese letters are held in the online project P.S. Post Scriptum - A Digital Archive of Ordinary Writing (Early Modern Portugal and Spain)The project describes itself as follows:
Within the P.S. (Post Scriptum) Project, systematic research will be developed, along with the publishing and historical-linguistic study of private letters written in Portugal and Spain along the Early Modern Ages. These documents are unpublished epistolary writings written by authors from different social backgrounds. They could be either masters or servants, adults or children, men or women, thieves, soldiers, artisans, priests, political activists, among other kinds of social agents. Their epistolarity survived by chance, in most cases, when their paths met the persecution means used by the Inquisition and the civil courts, two institutions that used private correspondence as criminal evidence. In other, much less frequent cases, the letters were preserved in a non-criminal context, although they also belong to the realm of backstage interaction and are easy to locate in situational terms. These textual resources often present an (almost) oral rhetoric, treating everyday issues of past centuries in a register that hasn't been easy to study, apart from brief examples. Not only does the P.S. Project present a wide collection of private letters, but it also makes it available as a scholarly digital edition and as an annotated corpus.
CLUL (Ed.). 2014. P.S. Post Scriptum. Arquivo Digital de Escrita Quotidiana em Portugal e Espanha na Época Moderna. 2014. URL: http://ps.clul.ul.pt.
These letters recall a pivotal time in Irish history, when Roger Casement attempted to bring German arms to the Irish revolutionaries of 1916. The metadata used here are drawn from letters in the National Library of Ireland, University College Dublin's Digital Library and Trinity College Dublin's Manuscripts & Archives Research Library. The letters held by UCD are from the Boehm/Casement Papers in the UCD Archives. Those held by Trinity College Dublin are from the Sir Roger Casement papers (1984-1916) Collection (IE TCD MS 8274) (© The Board of Trinity College Dublin). A large amount of content can be found in the National Library of Ireland's finding aid, though unfortunately all geographical metadata is absent from this source.
For mapping purposes, 100% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
A close friend of Thomas Clarke and central to the Rising itself, relatively little of Seán Mac Diarmada's correspondence survives. These few letters are drawn from the National Library of Ireland's collection of documents related to the signatories of the Irish Proclamation 1916.
The National Library of Ireland hold a huge number of playwright, Sean O'Casey's correspondence, but only a relatively small amount is online and in such a format that can be used. I have drawn on a small selection of this material, augmenting it with metadata relating to letters held by The University of Kansas Libraries. This small, but informative selection provides more detail on some of O'Casey's letters.
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was an artist, illustrator and writer. In 1842, she married the author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and illustrated several of his works. This selection of her correspondence is drawn from the New York Public Library's digital collections, specifically:
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection
of English and American Literature
The New York Public Library
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Most of Charles Ives's letters were mailed from New York or West Redding, Connecticut. Unfortunately detail on which letter was sent from which location is not provided by the source. Drawn from the book:
Tom C. Owens, ed. (2007). Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives. Berkeley: University of California Press.
It was work on this project that sparked my interest in the possibilities of letter metadata. I was asked to development a number of data visualisations to explore the possibilities of marked-up correspondence for the AHRC funded project, Digitising experiences of migration. The project, led by Hilary Nesi (PI) and Emma Moreton (CI) at Coventry University, brought together academics from both Europe and America. The dataset used on this site is the one used for this project. A website dedicated to these visualisations is online.
As with Daniel O'Connell, The diplomatic correspondence of the American Revolution, being the letters of Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, John Adams, John Jay, Arthur Lee, William Lee, Ralph Izard, Francis Dana, William Carmichael, Henry Laurens, John Laurens, M. de Lafayette, M. Dumas, and others, concerning the foreign relations of the United States during the whole Revolution; together with the letters in reply from the secret committee of Congress, and the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, also the entire correspondence of the French ministers, Gerard and Luzerne, with Congress by Sparks, Jared, 1789-1866, a series of twelve volumes, has been digitised and posted online. Again I have manually recorded the metadata necessary for visualisation and again given the constraints of time and personal stamina, I have only managed to record the first volume. This principally deals with Silas Deane, but the Commissioners in France mentioned are Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane and Arthur Lee.
For mapping purposes, 100% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
For over twenty-five years, the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, Thornton Wilder, and the Joycean Scholar, Adaline Glasheen, carried on a vibrant exploration of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, teasing out every allusion and enjoying every joke. Their wonderful letters are collected in:
Edward M. Burns and Joshua A. Gaylord, ed., A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2001.
Thomas Clarke was one of the key architects of the 1916 Easter Rising, while his wife Kathleen was a founder member of Cumann na mBan and became Dublin's first female Lord Mayor. These letters are drawn from the National Library of Ireland's collection of documents related to the signatories of the Irish Proclamation 1916.
For mapping purposes, 99% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
Led by An Foras Feasa's Susan Schreibman, The Thomas MacGreevy Archive is a long-term, interdisciplinary research project that explores the life, writings, and relationships of the Irish poet and critic, Thomas MacGreevy (1893-1967). The project makes exemplary use of TEI to document a fascinating correspondence of someone central to Twentieth Century Irish cultural life. There is one letter included that is mentioned in Mary Joan Egan's Thomas McGreevy and Wallace Stevens: A Correspondence.
For mapping purposes, almost 100% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. His collection Leaves of Grass had a profound effect on 19th Century poetry and his work reverberates to this day. This selection of his correspondence is drawn from the New York Public Library's digital collections, specifically:
The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection
of English and American Literature
The New York Public Library
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
The William Cullen Project is a collaborative project from the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (RCPE). It documents the consultation letters of one of the leading medical lecturers of the Eighteenth Century. The site itself is quite exhaustive in its treatment of the letters and is an excellent example of an online scholarly edition.
Vincent de Paul, the Congregation of the Mission, and the Papacy provides a unique insight into a turbulent milieu. The website was created by Dr Alison Forrestal (National University of Ireland, Galway) and Dr Felicia Roșu (Leiden University, Netherlands) with support provided by DePaul University (Chicago, USA), NUIG, and Leiden University. Only letters from the collection have been used.
The University of Leeds' Letters Database describes itself as " an informal finding-list that details Special Collections substantial holdings of manuscript correspondence". This is a huge and extremely varied resource with many hidden treasures. Unfortunately from the perspective of 'Visual Correspondence' no location data is available and dates for individual letters are not always indicated. Nevertheless the metadata that is available is perfectly suited to any visualisations that deal with people, e.g. the network graphs. That being said, the sheer number of items makes even these graphs unwieldy. For this reason it is best to build up a query geared towards a subset of the data (perhaps based on particular correspondents or years) rather than try to visualise the entire selection.
Edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker, the Van Gogh Letters Project is a rich insight into the life of the troubled artist. Destinations are not included in this data, so as with Darwin etc., I have extrapolated what destinations are shown.
For mapping purposes, almost 100% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.
There are over 5,000 letters in the online collection of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The letters constitute a veritable who's who of important figures from the Modern Era, featuring everyone from George Washington to James Joyce. Unfortunately the very diversity of the content makes extracting the metadata extremely time-consuming. At present only 260 letters feature, but as time permits I hope to increase this figure.
For mapping purposes, 100% of all available letter locations in this collection have been geo-coded.