A Rare Photo, and New Network Graphs of Mitford’s Reading

Greg has discovered a photograph of Mary Russell Mitford in the Reading Central Library Catalog! The photo was taken by Henry Fox Talbot, and is one of a kind of early photo that he invented called  a “Talbotype”, roughly contemporary with the daguerrotype. The Talbotype is apparently undated, but it must be from the 1840s or 50s, since Talbot pioneered his photographic method in 1841. We’ve added it to our little carousel of Mitford images on the Digital Mitford project site.

I have also been working on network analysis from 88 coded letters and literary texts that are established enough for us to coordinate data on Mitord’s social network and her many and frequent references to titles–of books, periodicals, and works of art. Here are some preliminary views:

and

Please visit our project site page on Mitford’s People, Places, and Networks for a discussion of the graphs, and what we’re currently working on in the Digital Mitford Project! Many, many thanks to our dedicated editors and their students on our amazing project team for all this wonderful data on early 19th-century literary networks!

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Tags: 19th century literature, book history, context markup, daguerrotype, dh, digital archives, digital database, network analysis, photography, prosopography, Talbotype, TEI