DigHum Tool: Palladio

Palladio is a network analysis and visualization to designed to graph relationships and geography as well as perform statistical calculations about the relationships.

The tool was built to generalize and extend the work done for the Mapping the Republic of Letters project which looked at the scientific correspondance archives at a large scale. The project felt that the letters were looked at in pieces are their respective archives or for the creation of critical editions of key subsets. The tool helped to map who corresponded with whom, and thus start to analyze how information could have travelled.

I consider this a DH tool because it takes analysis that would be done in small, laborous chunks over time by many researchers to tease apart correspondance groupings. So this is then technology that extends that framework to look at more information in similar ways. Instead of a network analysis of researchers at Oxford 1630-1650 (significantly limiting scope), the tool helps answer questions about how the communities were connected and identifies potential areas for future research. So someone could isolate a different communal subset, timeperiod, or information to create a new set of critical editions to better understand the history.

I have no experience using this tool, but I have done similar network analysis and graph theory statistics.