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This chapter uses social network analysis to visualize the fields of relations involving John Dennis, the most important critic of the first half of the eighteenth century, with the other protagonists in Alexander Pope’s satire, The Dunciad in Four Books (1743). By using visualizations generated by GraphViz, a program that creates topological graphs from sets of dyadic relations, and ShivaGraph, a tool that helps visualize large networks and navigate through them as through a map, this chapter brings to light data that is structurally embedded in the poem but not immediately legible given the large amount and complexity of information. In Dennis’s case, they reveal the competing stories told by the poem and the apparatus and the critic’s main role as the uncrowned king of The Dunciad’s textual periphery. These visualizations also highlight Dennis’s essential position as a network connector, his camp affiliations, the role played by peripheral characters in the plot network of the poem, and the main dunces targeted by Pope, or the poem’s “hall of infamy.”

This introduction provides a brief survey of the evolution of data visualization from its eighteenth-century beginnings, when the Scottish engineer and political scientist William Playfair created the first statistical graphs, to its present-day developments and use in period-related digital humanities projects. The author highlights the growing use of data visualization in major institutional projects, provides a literature review of representative works that employ data visualizations as a methodological tool, and highlights the contribution that this collection makes to digital humanities and the Enlightenment studies. Addressing essential period-related themes—from issues of canonicity, intellectual history, and book trade practices to canonical authors and texts, gender roles, and public sphere dynamics—, this collection also makes a broader argument about the necessity of expanding the very notion of “Enlightenment” not only spatially but also conceptually, by revisiting its tenets in light of new data. When translating the new findings afforded by the digital in suggestive visualizations, we can unveil unforeseen patterns, trends, connections, or networks of influence that could potentially revise existing master narratives about the period and the ideological structures at the core of the Enlightenment.

Projects such as the present one, which involve a collaboration of scholars coming from different fields to fill in a new niche in the study of the Arabian Peninsula, an area that has only recently gained scholarly attention, are only possible through sustained and generous support from a variety of stakeholders. We are therefore indebted, first and foremost, to our institution, and particularly the Office of Research at Zayed University, which generously supported this project through a two-year Research Incentive Fund grant that allowed us to conduct research both nationally and internationally, acquire the resources needed for completing this project, and cover the costs of publishing the book in Open Access. We are particularly thankful to Dr. Michael Allen, Assistant Provost for Faculty Affairs and Research, and to Dr. Fares Howari, Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, for their timely support and encouragement.Ileana Baird is also grateful for the extraordinary opportunity she had to conduct research as a Visiting Research Fellow at The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, in the spring of 2019. I would like to thank Nicole Bouché, the Executive Director of the library, for being so accommodating and supportive of my research, Susan Walker, head of Public Services, whose extraordinary expertise helped me unearth superb resources, both visual and textual, from the library's outstanding collections, Cynthia Roman, curator of Prints, Drawings and Paintings, whose insightful questions and comments made me think in new ways about my work, and Kristen McDonald and Scott Poglitsch, catalogue assistants, for their prompt and professional help in accessing the resources I needed during my fellowship and beyond. I also owe special thanks to Robin Dougherty, expert librarian in Middle East Studies at Sterling Memorial Library, for her useful guidance in the library's resources.Our work has benefitted immensely from the expert knowledge of our readers, who contributed their time, ideas, and expertise to make the chapters included in this collection the best they could be.

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