Using Archival Texts to Create Network Graphs of Musicians in Early Modern Venice

This project uses network graphs to depict musicians’ careers in late seventeenth-century Venice. The current network graph, viewable on the Musicians in Venice web page, demonstrates relationships between musicians and the institutions that employed them. The graph is bimodal, with nodes representing musicians (“people” nodes) and institutions (“place” nodes). Archival texts are incorporated into the visualization, with transcriptions of records that indicate musicians’ activity included in the node attributes. The entire project is text-based, with data derived from XML transcriptions of archival records in addition to assigned metadata. The current website is a proof of concept for a larger project that would demonstrate ways of displaying text as part of the network graph and using texts in creating network visualizations. The current graph focuses on the career of the composer Giovanni Legrenzi. Legrenzi worked for several prominent Venetian institutions from the early 1670s to his death in 1690 and ultimately was appointed to the most prestigious musical posts in the city. The musicians he worked with also served multiple institutions, either simultaneously or in succession, and their relationships with other musicians, patrons, and administrators often facilitated their movement between institutions. Legrenzi’s Venetian career presents an excellent case study of these musical connections in late seventeenth-century Venice, and studying these connections demonstrates how networks of musicians functioned in this time period. This study also provides a representative sample of how network visualization effectively demonstrates patterns in musicians’ careers in Venice. The texts in the network graph include transcribed administrative documents, mostly unpublished, from the Venetian institutions where Legrenzi was active between 1670 and 1690. These are primarily payment, hiring, and termination records, which document the activity of the musicians employed by or affiliated with these institutions. Several generations of musicologists have used these documents to identify where different musicians were working, when they were employed, and in what capacity (Bonta, 1964; Moore, 1981; Termini, 1981; and Selfridge-Field, 1994). In this sense, this treatment of the documents is standard to the field, but applies DH methodology and processes to create visual representations the data. This provides a new perspective on the sources. For instance, grouping the “person” nodes by centrality results in multiple sub-groups, and proximity among these nodes demonstrates shared institutions and implied communities. (Hanneman and Riddle, 2005: Chapter 10) (Mary Russell Mitford’s text-based network analysis of Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer provides an excellent example of this. In addition to demonstrating the behavior of agile, well-connected nodes, the graph displays modules of nodes as units of analysis (Wasserman and Faust, 1994: 4).