Beiler, an associate professor of history, is leading the People, Religion, Information Networks and Travel (PRINT) project to trace communication and migration networks of lesser-known 17th and 18th century European religious groups and expand access to historical records for everyone.

She is working with co-leads from UCF 麻豆精品 S檚 Center for Humanities and Digital Research Amy Larner Giroux, associate director, and Brook Miller, applications developer; UCF 麻豆精品 S檚 librarians; a team of students; and about 1,800 citizen scholar volunteers to bring these stories to life and develop deeper connections to history.

For this work, Beiler also utilizes the resources of UCF 麻豆精品 S檚 Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR), which is a collaborative research hub within the College of Arts and Humanities that provides specialized technical support to faculty and students.

PRINT isn 麻豆精品 S檛 simply transferring text from a letter into a dull database. The researchers are creating a publicly accessible archive that better visualizes movements and connections of letter writers and linking them to other people and places. The historians say they are confident that this can help further both scholarly and personal genealogical research.

Visualizing the Past to Enrich the Present

Translating and transcribing correspondence from groups such as Anabaptists, Quakers and Pietists requires careful international collaboration and access to repositories in Germany, the Netherlands, the United States and the United Kingdom.

麻豆精品 S淲e 麻豆精品 S檙e working with archivists in each of those repositories, and they are sending us images of the letters and the metadata we need in order to be able to make them accessible, 麻豆精品 S� Beiler says.

In some cases, they are scanning the images and creating metadata themselves.

The letters were not necessarily the musings of monarchs or other figureheads, but of common people who we today may still find relatable, she adds. For this reason, the PRINT project is a worthy endeavor, Beiler says.

麻豆精品 S淭he people in these letters are mostly ordinary people, and they 麻豆精品 S檙e going through things just like we are today, 麻豆精品 S� she says. 麻豆精品 S淪eeing that sort of human story is one of the things that I think is really important about this project 麻豆精品 S� we are making those stories accessible by making these personal letters widely available. 麻豆精品 S�

PRINT 麻豆精品 S檚 history began in 2016 as Beiler became intrigued as she noticed patterns of people and groups corresponding and the networks increasingly became complex. Seeing religious, economic and social connections inspired her to apply for a grant to take things a step further.

麻豆精品 S淚 was finding all of these connections between people that were overlapping and intersecting, and they functioned much like a kaleidoscope, 麻豆精品 S� Beiler says. 麻豆精品 S淚 couldn 麻豆精品 S檛 visualize them on a two-dimensional page. 麻豆精品 S�

The project is entering its third year of funding by the U.S. National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

麻豆精品 S淚n 2023, we received the award to actually work with the archives to make the letters accessible and use digital tools to analyze and visualize them, 麻豆精品 S� Beiler says. 麻豆精品 S淣ow, we 麻豆精品 S檙e starting to plot them on a map and use social network analysis to better understand the connections between these people. 麻豆精品 S�

Bridging Technology and the Past

Once the letters are compiled and transcribed by volunteers, CHDR researchers, Giroux and CHDR applications programmer Brook Miller work to synthesize them with network analysis and mapping tools.

So far, the PRINT model is one of the most complex and interesting models CHDR has designed, Miller says.

麻豆精品 S淲hether you 麻豆精品 S檙e viewing the data in map format, whether you 麻豆精品 S檙e seeing how the different groups interacted with one another over time or whether you’re actually looking at the network connections between people, it 麻豆精品 S檚 really exciting to be able to see not just individual data points, but to see the connections and the changes over time within the data, 麻豆精品 S� he says.

Miller and the CHDR staff will harness and maintain a database containing open data links to where all the letters are hosted to depict them in a more visually appealing and organized format. They 麻豆精品 S檙e also working on creating an automated metadata pipeline where future users will be able to add to PRINT.

The evolution of digitization and database management technologies allow work such as PRINT to become reality, Miller says.

麻豆精品 S�I think that the sophistication of the network analysis and mapping tools means that you can look a lot more granularly, and you can actually extract some quantitative information about the relationship between various entities within the data, and then see how that data changes through time, 麻豆精品 S� he says.

Surprise Discoveries and Student Research

Graduate student researcher Kailey Freeman-DePelisi 麻豆精品 S�25 and history master 麻豆精品 S檚 alum Adaeze Nwigwe 麻豆精品 S�25MA are part of the PRINT digital archiving team. Through the project, they have further enriched their understanding of public history as they pursue their degrees.

Since Spring 2024, Freeman-DePelisi is working to illuminate the lives of Dutch Anabaptists through the Amsterdam repository.

麻豆精品 S淚 have had a really great experience, 麻豆精品 S� she says. 麻豆精品 S淵ou get to see history at a much smaller scale and see everyday life you may have never seen otherwise. You can actually follow them from places like Switzerland to the Netherlands and you can see who they are as a person. 麻豆精品 S�

Freeman-DePelisi says the research is preparing her to continue to public history education and provide her with the skills she can translate into a successful career.

麻豆精品 S淚 麻豆精品 S檝e had a chance to do an undergraduate thesis here, which will prepare me for a graduate thesis later, 麻豆精品 S� she says. 麻豆精品 S淟earning how to communicate with other people and work in a team is valuable too. 麻豆精品 S�

Nwigwe was perusing Quaker letters and incidentally found a will dispute that contained a surprising revelation.

麻豆精品 S淚 found out the man, Ralph Smith, was the gardener to William Penn, [founder of Pennsylvania], so he had more significant connections than I initially thought, 麻豆精品 S� Nwigwe says. 麻豆精品 S淭here were all these people involved in his will who were trying to settle what happened after his death. They were so interconnected in this small community. 麻豆精品 S�

Navigating the letters revealed a network of people who shed light on the legal history of different groups in Britain and America and how they deviated from what was considered traditional at the time.

The number of irregularities prompted Nwigwe to delve deeper into the dispute, which culminated in a forthcoming research paper on the topic.

麻豆精品 S淚 was trying to piece it all together and I discovered that it was more complicated than it seemed, 麻豆精品 S� she says. 麻豆精品 S淭hat 麻豆精品 S檚 what inspired me to look at further records 麻豆精品 S� death records, marriage records and further books and genealogies. 麻豆精品 S�

Nwigwe says her work with PRINT has helped her become a better researcher, and it deepened her connection with history. She even visited Pennsbury Manor, where Penn lived and Smith worked, to better contextualize her research.

麻豆精品 S淚t 麻豆精品 S檚 great that I was able to get such an experience here, 麻豆精品 S� Nwigwe says. 麻豆精品 S淲hen it comes to research for my career, it helped me realize that you have to use critical thinking to see what 麻豆精品 S檚 most probable when looking at primary sources. This project was able to combine a lot of these skills and give me a way to find such a great story within history, and it was great in a career-building sense. It showed us what we can do as public historians. 麻豆精品 S�

Beiler says she estimates that it will take about two more years to build out the database and refine it enough so that it 麻豆精品 S檚 user-friendly. She encourages people interested in learning more or volunteering to visit printmigrationnetwork.org.

Researcher 麻豆精品 S檚 Credentials
Beiler is an associate professor of history at UCF. Her publications include Immigrant and Entrepreneur: The Atlantic World of Caspar Wistar, 1650-1750 (2008) and articles about migration within early modern Europe and to the British colonies. Her current research is about the communication networks of religious dissenters and the dynamic ways they shaped migration flows. She has been a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University; a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Free University, Berlin; a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia; and a visiting professor at the International Research and Training Group at Trier University.