We are pleased to introduce two new members to the Networking Archives team: Yann Ryan and Philip Beeley. They joined us as Fellows earlier this year, and will be undertaking key parts of the collaborative research projects that we have scoped, including co-authoring the project ‘multigraph’ with the rest of the team, and co-editing the collection of essays coming out of the training schools.
Yann recently completed a PhD thesis ‘Networks, Maps and Readers: Foreign News Reporting in London Newsbooks, 1645 – 1649’ (QMUL), which looked at the flow of news from overseas to London, and examined how this can be traced and measured using computational techniques (including network analysis) as well as more traditional scholarly methods. Prior to the Networking Archives project, he worked in the British Library as a Curator of newspaper data – a newly-created post which sought to promote the use of the Library’s digital newspaper holdings to a wider audience.
His current research interests include historical network analysis, the history of news and intelligencing in Europe, digital and spatial humanities, as well as early modern post and communications. He’s also keen on developing alternative ways of communicating historical research, and is experimenting with writing an open-source book on newspaper data as well as producing computational tools for the Networking Archives team.
Philip’s research and publications are focused on the history of science and epistolary cultures in early modern Europe. He is especially interested in the role played by correspondence networks in the emergence of early modern scientific thought and in the ways in which mathematical ideas were disseminated and discussed both in scholarly communities and across different social milieus. A particular focus thereby is on the history of early Royal Society and of its relations to cognate institutions across the continent. A further area of his research is on early modern cryptography and its significance for diplomatic decision-making as well as in shaping political affairs and military events in seventeenth-century Europe.
He has been involved with the Oxford-based Cultures of Knowledge project and its collaborative database of early modern correspondence EMLO since their inception. Until recently, he was Co-I on the AHRC-funded Reading Euclid project, which investigated the impact of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry on early modern culture in Britain and Ireland by examining educational, editorial, and reading practices through printed, scribal, and other material records.
Philp and Yann’s arrival on the project has already given us a huge boost in terms of productivity, and we are looking forward to sharing the fruits of our collaborative labour in due course.