Protestant Letter Networksregulatory networks, and social networks-share an underlying order and follow simple laws, and therefore can be analyzed using the same mathematical tools and models.2 These publications build on work from various different disciplines, such as sociology, mathematics, and physics, which stretches back some decades. The theoretical approaches of social network analysis have already made an impact in the fields of historical corpus linguistics, coterie studies, and the history of science, amongst others; but the application of mathematical and computational techniques developed by scientists working in the field of complex networks to the arts and humanities is a relatively recent development, and one that is gaining increasing traction, offering as it does both technical tools and a sense of contemporaneity in a world now dominated by social networking platforms. despite these developments, however, there is still much work to be done before these statistical methods are embedded within the literary historian's toolbox. all too often the word "network" is used by scholars in this field as a useful metaphor-in much the way that Thomas More wielded the word "canker." This article will demonstrate how the mathematical tools employed by network scientists offer valuable ways of understanding the development of underground religious communities in the sixteenth century, as well as providing different approaches for historians and literary scholars working in archives.while it is not possible to corroborate More's fears about the extent and organization of evangelical communities in england during the 1530s due to lack of documentation, considerable evidence for the structure of the underground Protestant communities functioning in the catholic reign of Mary i survives in collections of correspondence. early modern correspondence provides a unique textual witness to social relations and structures. gary schneider has described renaissance letters as "sociotexts": as "crucial material bearers of social connection, instruments by which social ties were initiated, negotiated, and consolidated." 3 Letters were the method by which people sought patronage, garnered favor, and engineered their social mobility; they were a means of communicating alliance, fidelity, and homage; and they could be used "as testimonies, as material evidence of social connectedness."4 The modern perception of private correspondence was one that simply did not exist in the early modern period. instead, epistolary conventions implicated multiple parties in the composition, transmission, and reception of letters. common letters (intended for more than one recipient or written by more than one sender) most clearly demarcate the idea of an epistolary community, but senders also

This work presents defoe, a new scalable and portable digital eScience toolbox that enables historical research. It allows for running text mining queries across large datasets, such as historical newspapers and books in parallel via Apache Spark. It handles queries against collections that comprise several XML schemas and physical representations. The proposed tool has been successfully evaluated using five different large-scale historical text datasets and two HPC environments, as well as on desktops. Results shows that defoe allows researchers to query multiple datasets in parallel from a single command-line interface and in a consistent way, without any HPC environment-specific requirements.

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Examining works by some of the most famous prisoners from the early modern period including Thomas More, Lady Jane Grey and Thomas Wyatt, Ruth Ahnert presents the first major study of prison literature dating from this era. She argues that the English Reformation established the prison as an influential literary sphere. In the previous centuries we find only isolated examples of prison writings, but the religious and political instability of the Tudor reigns provided the conditions for the practice to thrive. This book shows the wide variety of genres that prisoners wrote, and it explores the subtle tricks they employed in order to appropriate the site of the prison for their own agendas. Ahnert charts the spreading influence of such works beyond the prison cell, tracing the textual communities they constructed, and the ways in which writings were smuggled out of prison and then disseminated through script and print.

2013, as the leak by Edward Snowden brought to light, the National Security Agency was engaged in massive-scale network analysis using data from nine internet providers.The study and critique of networks has predominantly taken place within the domains of computer science and related scientific fields, the military, and the tech sector due to the scale of digital data being analysed and the nature of the investigations prompting their study. This book not only argues that arts and humanities scholars can use the same kind of visual and quantitative analysis of networks to shed light on the study of culture; it also contends that the critical skills native to humanistic inquiry are vital to the theorisation and critique of our networked world. Network analysis, as we define it in this book, is a set of practices and discourses that sit at the interface of the natural sciences, humanities, social sciences, computer science, and design. We contend that networks are a category of study that cuts across traditional academic boundaries and that has the potential to unite diverse disciplines through a shared understanding of complexity in our worldwhether that complexity pertains to the nature of the interactions of proteins in gene-regulatory networks or to the network of textual variants that can reveal the lineage of a poem. Moreover, this shared framework provides a compelling case for collaboration across those boundaries, for bringing together computational tools for quantitative network analysis, together with theories, discourses, and applied techniques from the social sciences, the humanities, visual design, and art practice.The cases of Lombardi and Barabási provide an instructive way of grasping that shared framework because, superficially, their work has very little in common. Barabási and Albert explicitly cite the computerisation of data acquisition as essential to their research. By contrast, Lombardi's research process was analogue. He gathered his data on three-by-five notecards. There is no evidence that Lombardi read Barabási and Albert's groundbreaking work in statistics and physics; rather, his inspiration was panorama and history painting. He used the term 'narrative structures' to describe his handdrawn webs of connection. Produced through an iterative process of refinement, the work is human in scale, legible visually in its entirety. Perhaps more importantly, it is his interpretation of a carefully researched but inevitably incomplete record. It does not pretend to objectivity. In stark contrast, Barabási 4Publishing and Book Culture