Tracing Race in the Archive

Interactive Network Visualizations

“Tracing Race in the Archive” maps interconnections among poems relating to race as they circulated in manuscript and print in the seventeenth century. Drawing on data from the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts and the Union First Line Index of English Verse, this tool traces poetic representations of race and racialized subjects as they traveled—sometimes in clusters, sometimes independently of one another—through the early modern archive. The goal is to develop our understanding of how discourse about race developed as part of the social lives of texts.

In its current iteration, this tool is based around sources that contain Henry Rainolds’s poem “A Blackamoor Maid Wooing a Fair Young Man,” showing connections to seventeen other poems relating directly or indirectly to race that appear in those sources. With over seventy separate witnesses, Rainolds’s poem (along with its companion piece, Henry King’s “The Boy’s Answer”), was one of the most highly copied poems of its kind in the period. It thus serves as a convenient starting place for this project. The seventeen other poems were chosen from among the over 4,000 poems contained in the 43 sources examined and represent a small sample of the poems that circulated alongside Rainolds’s poem. The criteria of selection were deliberately loose in order to capture the range of potential racial connotations that might be activated through proximity to “A Blackamoor Maid,” from poems that are explicitly about African people, to poems about dark and fair skin, to poems that feature blackness in ways that do not tie it explicitly to racialized bodies but are nevertheless suggestive when read in the context of other poems about race.

This current demo set of visualizations focuses on first-degree connections to Rainolds’s poem; sources were selected for these visualizations purely on the basis of their inclusion of this text. As such, this demo version is not intended as a comprehensive map but, rather, as a proof-of-concept illustration of how archival connections among these and other thematically related texts might be mapped. Future phases of this project will add more related poems to the collection curated here and will expand the list of sources to include ones beyond those that contain Rainolds’s poem. A further phase of the project could allow users to explore poems within a five- or ten-poem radius of a chosen poem as it appears in a given source, with bibliographic adjacency potentially revealing other thematic and generic associations that might overlap with the category of poems relating to race.

PLEASE NOTE: This website is intended for demonstration purposes only; please do not circulate without permission.

Poems

Listed by first line in order of frequency in the collected sources, with links to representative texts.

Sources

British Library

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Bipartite Graph

Bipartite Graph

A two-column layout separating poems and sources with clear connection lines. This visualization makes the bipartite structure of the network explicit, with interactive node state management and dynamic connection highlighting. Perfect for analyzing the fundamental structure of poem-source relationships.

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Poem-source Matrix

Poem:Source Matrix

A comprehensive matrix showing all poem-source relationships in a grid format. Each cell represents a connection, with multiple sorting algorithms and detailed statistics about the network structure. Ideal for systematic analysis of the complete network and identifying patterns across the entire corpus.

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Poem Similarity Matrix

Poem Similarity Matrix

Reveals relationships between poems based on shared source appearances using Jaccard similarity coefficients. Shows which poems have similar transmission patterns and source distributions. Features configurable display modes and threshold filtering to focus on the most significant relationships.

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source Similarity Matrix

Source Similarity Matrix

Analyzes relationships between sources based on shared poem content to identify source families, scribal traditions, and collection patterns. This view helps reveal which sources contain similar selections of poems, suggesting common sources or related compilation strategies.

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Circular Network

Circular Network

A radial network visualization with poems and sources arranged in concentric circles around a selected center node. Features dynamic center selection, connection highlighting, and color intensity based on connection counts. Excellent for exploring the network from the perspective of individual items.

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Force-Directed Network

Force-Directed Network

A physics-based network using D3.js force simulation where nodes naturally cluster based on their connections. Features draggable nodes, adjustable physics parameters, and real-time connection highlighting. The simulation reveals emergent community structures and clustering patterns within the source-poem network.

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