Between all the end-of-semester meetings and paperwork, I’ve been working away on my antislavery women’s networks project (mainly because the conference is next week), and I’ve gotten my network analysis done at least. The mapping portion will take a few more days. Here’s the visualization of Maria Weston Chapman’s correspondence network. I have some statistical analysis as well, but I’ll save that (and the painfully simple explanation of those statistics) for the conference paper.
A brief guide to the image: It was created in Gephi and the darker the line, the more letters were written between the pair of people. Richard Davis Webb and Maria Weston Chapman have the largest collection of correspondence, followed by Mary Estlin and Chapman and then Garrison and the rest of the Weston sisters. Chapman had many more exchanges with abolitionists in the British isles than historians have previously discussed (and from my careful perusal of these letters in compiling the database, the letters to and from British and Irish abolitionists were often longer than those to others in the US).
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