I was interested to see what happens when you take Pennant’s ‘ego’ network, as found in the letters you’ve worked on, and joined it to the full EMLO dataset.

There are three ways to think about Pennant’s network:

With just the Pennant data, we can look at the first type of network, and a small amount of the second. By matching names to EMLO data and then extracting all of their letters, we can see much more of the alters and also all of their further connections.

Pennant and all his direct connections.

The simplest way to think about Pennant’s network: all the people who either send or receive a letter from Pennant. Plotting this shows that an ego network is a star formation: all nodes have to be connected to a central node.

It’s a simple star formation. I’ve also calculated the weighted degree for each node: this is just a count of all of that person’s incoming and outgoing letters. The table below lists all of Pennant’s connections and their incoming, outgoing, and total letters sent:

Ego Plus Alters

The next step was to link the Pennant spreadsheet to EMLO. We’ve found 20 names with existing EMLO data, including Pennant himself, and this means I can extract all of those individuals’ networks and find other interesting connections. In this plot below, I’ve essentially taken Pennant’s ego network as found above, and merged it with EMLO. Green links are links which have come from the new Pennant sheet; red links are from EMLO. It’s a bit difficult to see, but some links are found in both and are sort of brown: William Huddesford, for example, who appears as a contact of Pennant in both EMLO and the original data - I’m presuming the same letter. If you click on a node, it’ll highlight it and their direct connections, and you can also select a node to highlight with the drop-down menu.

Here you get a sense of how Pennant’s contacts were themselves in contact with each other: the red links show how much of this is thanks to finding linked data for those 20 names. Those at the centre have more connections to other Pennant contacts and might be worth highlighting: I thought it was interesting how many connections William Huddesford (curator of the Ashmolean between 1755-72) has to Pennant’s network - 9 in total, including Pennant himself. Some other observations:

Pennant extended ego network

The next step is to also add in all of the alter’s own direct connections. This gives a sense of the wider network in which all of these people were embedded. Again, links have come from the Pennant spreadsheet are coloured green, allowing you to see how the Pennant data sits into this larger part of EMLO.

This brings up individuals who are not connected to Pennant, but are connected to several of his connections, a bit like the ‘overlap’ method Sebastian developed and Esther and Howard are using in another article in this volume. This map raises interesting questions for me:

Mapping Pennant’s extended network

We can also map these networks: these two maps takes every connect from the ego and extended ego networks above, and maps all of the origins of letters between each pair of correspondents. This first map is equivalent to the first ego network above ‘Ego Plus Alters’. Pennant’s direct connections are highlighted in green, and the addition connections are highlighted in red (you can toggle them on or off).

This second map is equivalent to the second ego network diagram (‘extended ego network’). Again, points are coloured by their type: a direct connection to Pennant, or in this case, all the indirect connections.

Observations: