PhD Placement on Mapping Caribbean Diasporic Networks through Correspondence

Every year the British Library host a range of PhD placement scheme projects. If you are interested in applying for one of these, the 2022 opportunities are advertised here. There are currently 15 projects available across Library departments, all starting from June 2022 onwards and ending before March 2023. If you would like to work with born digital collections, you may want to read last week’s Digital Scholarship blog post about two projects on enhanced curation, hybrid archives and emerging formats. However, if you are interested in Caribbean diasporic networks and want to experiment creating network analysis visualisations, then read on to find out more about the “Mapping Caribbean Diasporic Networks through correspondence (2022-ACQ-CDN)” project.

This is an exciting opportunity to be involved with the preliminary stages of a project to map the Caribbean Diasporic Network evident in the ‘Special Correspondence’ files of the Andrew Salkey Archive. This placement will be based in the Contemporary Literary and Creative Archives team at the British Library with support from Digital Scholarship colleagues. The successful candidate will be given access to a selection of correspondence files to create an item level dataset and explore the content of letters from the likes of Edward Kamau Brathwaite, C.L.R. James, and Samuel Selvon.

Photograph of Andrew Salkey, from the Andrew Salkey Archive, Deposit 10310. With kind permission of Jason Salkey.

The main outcome envisaged for this placement is to develop a dataset, using a sample of ten files, linking the data and mapping the correspondent’s names, location they were writing from, and dates of the correspondence in a spreadsheet. The placement student will also learn how to use the Gephi Open Graph Visualisation Platform to create a visual representation of this network, associating individuals with each other and mapping their movement across the world between the 1950s and 1990s.

Gephi Quick Start Tutorial

Gephi is open-source software for visualising and analysing networks, they provide a step-by-step guide to getting started, with the first step to upload a spreadsheet detailing your ‘nodes’ and ‘edges’. To show an example of how Gephi can be used, We've included an example below, which was created by previous British Library research placement student Sarah FitzGerald from the University of Sussex, using data from the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) to create a Gephi visualisation of all EAP applications received between 2004 and 2017.

Network visualisation of EAP Applications created by Sarah FitzGerald

In this visualisation the size of each country relates to the number of applications it features in, as country of archive, country of applicant, or both. The colours show related groups. Each line shows the direction and frequency of application. The line always travels in a clockwise direction from country of applicant to country of archive, the thicker the line the more applications. Where the country of applicant and country of archive are the same the line becomes a loop. If you want to read more about the other visualisations that Sarah created during her project, please check out these two blog posts:

We hope this new PhD placement will offer the successful candidate the opportunity to develop their specialist knowledge through access to the extensive correspondence series in the Andrew Salkey archive, and to undertake practical research in a curatorial context by improving the accessibility of linked metadata for this collection material. This project is a vital building block in improving the Library’s engagement with this material and exploring the ways it can be accessed by a wider audience.

If you want to apply, details are available on the British Library website at https://www.bl.uk/research-collaboration/doctoral-research/british-library-phd-placement-scheme. Applications for all 2022/23 PhD Placements close on Friday 25 February 2022, 5pm GMT. The application form and guidelines are available online here. Please address any queries to research.development@bl.uk.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom) and Eleanor Casson (@EleCasson), Curator in Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts.