Communication Now and Then: Analyzing the Republic of Letters as a Communication Network

TL;DR

This study compares historical letter communication patterns from the 16th to 19th centuries with modern digital communication, revealing notable similarities in network structures despite technological differences.

Contribution

It introduces a new large-scale epistolary dataset and provides the first comparative analysis of historical and modern communication network patterns.

Findings

Historical and modern communication networks share structural similarities.

Dyadic interactions and ego-level behaviors are consistent across eras.

Some dataset limitations prevent full comparison of all network aspects.

Abstract

Huge advances in understanding patterns of human communication, and the underlying social networks where it takes place, have been made recently using massive automatically recorded data sets from digital communication, such as emails and phone calls. However, it is not clear to what extent these results on human behaviour are artefacts of contemporary communication technology and culture and if the fundamental patterns in communication have changed over history. This paper presents an analysis of historical epistolary metadata with the aim of comparing the underlying historical communication patterns with those of contemporary communication. Our work uses a new epistolary dataset containing metadata on over 150 000 letters sent between the 16th and 19th centuries. The analyses indicate striking resemblances between contemporary and epistolary communication network patterns, including dyadic interactions and ego-level behaviour. Despite these positive findings, certain aspects of the letter datasets are insufficient to corroborate other similarities or differences for these communication networks.