Information Flow

Abstract Chapter 6 examines how information flowed through communication networks. Focusing on the data field containing letter descriptions, it begins by examining how changes in a word’s usage over time can be measured, and shows that extracting words with the greatest ranked change in usage is an extremely effective method for discovering items of topical interest to the Tudor government. A new method offered by the authors shows that words with the closest temporal profiles often share these patterns because they refer to the same topic. The chapter continues to show that it is possible to reconstruct and examine the network of people corresponding about a given topic, as demonstrated by two extended case studies on Henry VIII’s divorce, and a short episode within the Dutch Revolt (1578–9). While these events are temporally and topically distinct, they share an important structural feature—a fissure that divides the networks into two main communities. It is possible to automatically discover other topic networks bearing such a feature by ranking the graphs by their modularity. In these highly modular graphs we almost always capture two contrasting viewpoints on the given event: the Tudor state’s perspective, captured though its diplomatic networks, and a second foreign perspective, gleaned either through interception or (more often for the period prior to 1547) the editorial policy of the Victorian editors of the Letters and Papers, who decided to include in their catalogues descriptions of papers from foreign archives pertinent to Henrician state affairs.