tudor_letters — Tudor State Papers correspondence (1509-1603)

Description

The correspondence network of the Tudor State Papers, the official government records of England under the Tudors (1509-1603), from the dataset of R. Ahnert, S. E. Ahnert, J. Cree and L. Fikkers that accompanies the book "Tudor Networks of Power". It contains, to the best of the authors' knowledge, all the letters in the State Papers Domestic and Foreign, extracted from the metadata of the State Papers Online resource (Gale Cengage), which follows the State Papers Calendars of the 19th century; the identities of people and places of writing were disambiguated and deduplicated by the authors.

Nodes are people (or, in some cases, collective senders and recipients, e.g. a convent or a council), and a directed edge from $i$ to $j$ is a letter sent by $i$ to $j$; pairs of people exchanged many letters (a multigraph). Many letters are dated only by a range of possible dates (sometimes very wide, when the calendars give no date); letters without any date have empty dates, and a few malformed dates of the dataset (e.g. the end date 5720101, or months 00 and 91) are kept as they are. The people's labels are as in the dataset (e.g. "A. Lady Kingston"); for a subset of people, the dataset gives links to biographical resources (Wikipedia, Kate Emerson's "Who Was Who in Tudor England", the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the History of Parliament, VIAF and Wikidata), of which the specific web page, and the Wikidata and VIAF identifiers, are included. The list of women among the correspondents used in the book (chapter 5; 857 identifiers, of which 838 are among the people of the dataset), from the authors' code repository, is included as a vertex property. The other derived data of the repository (co-authorship and mention networks, itineraries) are not included.

The coordinates of the places of writing are given in the dataset with the signs of the longitudes reversed (west positive); they are given here with the usual convention (east positive).

The network has the following properties:

(Node) label: the label of the person in the dataset.
(Node) person_id: the person's identifier in the dataset.
(Node) is_woman: whether the person is in the authors' list of women correspondents.
(Node) webpage: the URL of the person's biographical web page (Wikipedia, Kate Emerson's biographies, ...), or empty.
(Node) webpage_type: the kind of the web page: WP (Wikipedia), KEH (Kate Emerson's "Who Was Who in Tudor England"), ODNB, HOP (History of Parliament), VIAF, other, or empty.
(Node) keh_context: the context of the person in Kate Emerson's biographies (e.g. under which person's entry they appear), or empty.
(Node) wikidata, viaf: the Wikidata and VIAF identifiers of the person, or empty.
(Edge) date_from, date_to: the range of possible dates of the letter (YYYY-MM-DD; equal if the date is known exactly), or empty if unknown.
(Edge) ms_id and ms_ref: the identifier of the manuscript in State Papers Online and its archival reference (e.g. SP 1/231 f.189).
(Edge) place: the place of writing (as disambiguated by the authors), or empty if not known; 1,111 letters have several places of writing, separated by "; ".
(Edge) place_id: the identifiers of the places of writing (empty if not known).
(Edge) latitude, longitude: the coordinates of the places of writing (NaN for the 105 places without coordinates).

Tags

Social Communication Offline Unweighted Multigraph Timestamps Metadata

Added

2026-10-31

Citation

R. Ahnert and S. E. Ahnert, "Tudor Networks of Power." Oxford University Press (2023) 10.1093/oso/9780198858973.001.0001 Sci-Hub
R. Ahnert, S. E. Ahnert, J. Cree and L. Fikkers, "Tudor Networks of Power - correspondence network dataset." Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository (2023) 10.17863/CAM.99562 Sci-Hub

Upstream URL OK

https://github.com/tudor-networks-of-power/code/tree/main/TNP_DATA
https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.99562

Upstream license

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Networks

Tip: hover over a column header 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
tudor_letters	20,560	139,297	6.78	268.47	61.60	69.38	-0.32	0.11	11	0.90	Directed	Unipartite	label person_id is_woman webpage webpage_type keh_context wikidata viaf	date_from date_to ms_id ms_ref place place_id latitude longitude	2.1 MiB	2.7 MiB	2.7 MiB	3.1 MiB

Ridiculograms^*

^* 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.