The Correspondence Network
Click one dot, then another, to compare two people, or search anyone in the collection to pull them onto the map with their correspondents.
About this view · how it was made
Each dot is a person; each line is at least one letter between them, and the thicker the line, the more letters passed between that pair. The dataset holds far more people than any single picture could show legibly, so the top 200 are appear as nodes.
Circles. Color sorts people into circles. A circle is a cluster of correspondents who exchanged letters heavily among themselves (more with each other than with people outside the group). Each circle is named for the person in it who left the most letters, which is a label of convenience, not a claim that they led the group or that everyone in the circle wrote to everyone else.
How the circles were found. The grouping is done by the database, not by hand. Two people share a color because the pattern of who-wrote-to-whom places them in the same densely connected cluster, not because a historian put them together. (If interested, the method is modularity-based community detection, run with the standard Louvain and Leiden algorithms).
Comparing two people. Click one dot and then another (or search for two names), and the readout answers a single question: did these two write to each other? If they did, it reports how many letters exist in the collection between them. If they did not, it names the correspondents to people they both wrote to. That is a statement about shared contacts, not a claim that the two knew each other.
A note on the data: the Rotunda collection in this time period is heavily weighted toward the Papers of George Washington, as the publication is the largest, by series and individual volume. Find out more about these papers here: https://washingtonpapers.org/.