correspsearch_letters — Historical correspondence networks (LetterSampo: correspSearch and Finland)

Description

Networks of historical letters from the knowledge graphs of the LetterSampo project (Semantic Computing Research Group, Aalto University and University of Helsinki), which harmonized the metadata of letters (sender, recipient, date and places) from several sources:

correspsearch_v2 and correspsearch_v1: the letters of correspSearch, the service of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences that aggregates the metadata of letters (in the CMIF format) from hundreds of printed and digital scholarly editions of correspondence, mostly of German-speaking persons from the 16th to the 20th century, as converted to RDF by LetterSampo, in the two versions of the data publication (v2 of June 2022, with 132,138 letters, and v1 of February 2022). correspSearch has grown since; only these conversions are available as a bulk download.
finland: LetterSampo Finland (version 1.0.0, May 2025), the letters of 19th-century (and later) Finnish archives and editions (the Finnish Literature Society, the National Archives and National Library of Finland, the Swedish Literature Society in Finland, Åbo Akademi University Library, the editions of the letters of Topelius, Snellman, Lönnrot, Edelfelt, ...), with about 1.3 million letters.

Each node is a correspondent (a person or a group, e.g. a society, a firm or an office), as identified by the sources and harmonized by LetterSampo, and a directed edge from $i$ to $j$ is a letter sent by $i$ to $j$; letters with several senders or recipients give an edge for each pair. Pairs of correspondents exchanged many letters (multigraphs). Letters without a known sender or recipient are left out. In finland, the correspondents of the sources ("proxies") are merged into the harmonized actors of LetterSampo, as in its portal; proxies without a harmonized actor are kept as they are.

The networks have the following properties:

(Node) name: the name of the correspondent.
(Node) uri: the URI of the correspondent in the knowledge graph.
(Node) type: Person or Group (correspsearch_*: both, for a few actors typed as both).
(Node) gender: Female, Male, or empty if not known.
(Node) birth, death: the dates of birth and death (or of the beginning and end of groups), as in the data (YYYY-MM-DD, or a year), or empty.
(Node) gnd, viaf, wikidata (correspsearch_*): the identifiers of the correspondent in the GND (German National Library), VIAF and Wikidata, or empty.
(Node) sent_letters, received_letters (finland): the numbers of letters sent and received by the actor in LetterSampo Finland.
(Edge) date_from, date_to: the range of possible dates of the letter (YYYY-MM-DD, or as given in finland, e.g. 1899-1909), or empty if unknown.
(Edge) label: the label of the letter in the knowledge graph (e.g. "1520 Jul 22: Melanchthon, Philipp (Wittenberg) to Spalatin, Georg (Lochau)").
(Edge) place_from, place_to (correspsearch_*): the places from which the letter was sent and to which it was sent, or empty.
(Edge) latitude_from, longitude_from, latitude_to, longitude_to (correspsearch_*): the coordinates of these places (NaN if not known).
(Edge) source: the edition (correspsearch_*) or the source organization (finland) of the letter's metadata.
(Edge) fonds (finland): the archival fonds (collection) of the letter.

Tags

Social Communication Offline Unweighted Multigraph Timestamps Metadata

Added

2026-10-31

Citation

E. Hyvönen, P. Leskinen and J. Tuominen, "LetterSampo correspSearch data publication." Zenodo (2022) 10.5281/zenodo.6631357 Sci-Hub
A. Ahola, M. Björklund, S. Drobac, et al., "LetterSampo Finland." Zenodo (2025) 10.5281/zenodo.15210590 Sci-Hub
S. Dumont, "correspSearch - Connecting Scholarly Editions of Letters." Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 10 (2016) 10.4000/jtei.1742 Sci-Hub

Upstream URL OK

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6631357
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15210590
https://zenodo.org/records/6631357
https://zenodo.org/records/15210590
https://correspsearch.net/
https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/rrl/
https://kirjesampo.fi/

Upstream license

CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Networks

Tip: click on a column header to sort the list, or hover over it for a description.

Column legend

$\left<k\right>$: Mean degree
$\sigma_k$: Standard deviation of the degrees
$\lambda_h$: Largest eigenvalue of the Hashimoto (non-backtracking) matrix
$\tau$: Random walk mixing time
$r$: Degree assortativity
$c$: Global clustering coefficient
$\oslash$: (Pseudo-) diameter
$S$: Relative size of the largest component
NPs: Node properties
EPs: Edge properties

Name	Nodes	Edges	$\left<k\right>$	$\sigma_k$	$\lambda_h$	$\tau$	$r$	$c$	$\oslash$	$S$	Kind	Mode	NPs	EPs	gt	GraphML	GML	csv
correspsearch_v2	16,731	130,104	7.78	219.15	22.71	1304.33	-0.34	0.05	17	0.96	Directed	Unipartite	name uri type gender birth death gnd viaf wikidata	date_from date_to label place_from place_to latitude_from longitude_from latitude_to longitude_to source	2.3 MiB	2.8 MiB	2.8 MiB	3.4 MiB
correspsearch_v1	16,745	130,104	7.77	219.06	22.66	1306.64	-0.34	0.05	17	0.96	Directed	Unipartite	name uri type gender birth death gnd viaf wikidata	date_from date_to label place_from place_to latitude_from longitude_from latitude_to longitude_to source	2.3 MiB	2.8 MiB	2.8 MiB	3.3 MiB
finland	107,172	1,283,361	11.97	223.97	73.49	1576.36	-0.14	0.13	17	0.96	Directed	Unipartite	name uri type gender birth death sent_letters received_letters	date_from date_to label source fonds	13.6 MiB	16.2 MiB	15.7 MiB	18.3 MiB

Ridiculograms^*

correspsearch_v2 drawing — correspsearch_v2

correspsearch_v1 drawing — correspsearch_v1

^* These are automatically generated force-directed visualizations, and can be quite meaningless for networks both big and small. They should not be taken seriously as sources of scientific insight. See here for a discussion.