A Pilgrim in Narnia has a post today that mentions, among other things, a social-network analysis of the relationships among Inklings, published in January 2019, that lines up neatly with one of the interests of this blog.

H.H. Kim goes through all the volumes of the letters of C.S. Lewis and produces a set of uni-polar graphs showing all the people with whom Lewis exchanged letters. The figures are impressive – that’s a lot of people. [1] Kim also sets up a chronological analysis, but not in the form of a graph, just a bunch of tables.  The reason, as the Conclusion says, is that ‘The biggest limitation of this exploratory paper was the inability to create a directed “complete” network between 1) Lewis and his recipients, and 2) among Lewis’s recipients.’

That’s where my efforts to look at time-evolution of the graphs hit a wall, too. Building off Diana Glyer’s book gives a much more complete picture of the connections among people who aren’t Lewis, but most interactions between people have nothing like the date precision that letters provide. Even when Lewis is involved, most of the important connections don’t involve written records. Kim points out that there are hardly any letters between Lewis and Tolkien.  Which makes sense: why write when you can just raise your voice? [2]

This is possibly the most frustrating thing about research in the humanities, to a scientist. When scientists think of a question that we don’t have enough information to answer, the next step is to figure out an experiment that will give us the other things we need to know. In humanities, going and getting more information is a lot less likely. It’s not at all possible with medieval literature (just finished the class, hurrah!).  Things are not quite so hopeless with the 20th Century. And, of course, as long as storage media can still be read, it’s not going to be an issue at all with the 21st.

[1] I would tell you which figure I mean, but for some reason the editors of VII don’t use figure numbers.  Possibly due to the shameful under-representation of scientific analysis in their journal to date.

[2] Roman historians make the same complaint: if Atticus had just stayed in Greece we’d know a lot more about the late Roman Republic than we do. Nobody writes letters to someone nearby, and letters are much of what we know. As Anthony Everitt put it in Cicero, “when Atticus is with Cicero in Rome the picture breaks up.” (page ix, but I promise I read the whole book.)