Networks

Network analysis has fast become a burgeoning field within digital humanities as a wider array of digital tools becomes available to humanities scholars. For researchers of women’s writing, network analysis is an especially useful approach to the study of early modern women’s lives, as it can bring to the fore the agency of these writers within their social milieux, can facilitate larger-scale analyses of the interconnectedness of various women writers and their peers, and highlight underlying patterns that can raise new questions and open new avenues of research. This entry will consider how scholars of women’s writing have theorized and engaged with the concept of women’s networks, before considering the digital turn and giving an overview of different ways of approaching network analysis and the different types of sources that are suited to this method. It will assess recent projects to see how they accounted for gender in their datasets and point to important resources for those who want to learn more about network analysis.