This paper explores the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) for individual historians, by focusing on the correspondence archives of Rosey E. Pool (1905-1971). Pool's position in her international network of writers and scholars will be examined through her contacts with Hoyt W. Fuller and Robert Hayden over the period 1966 to 1971. The different positions these three actors held towards The First World Festival of Negro Arts (Dakar, April 1966) will be examined. The Dakar Festival was an important and symbolic event in the transnational Négritude movement. Using the theories of 'intersectionality' and 'collective identity,' Pool's network will be analysed by focusing on specific religious and personal features that have influenced the dynamics of her network. A deeper insight of this specific period will be provided by performing a close reading of key letters and by placing the correspondence in its historical context. At the same time, the use of distant reading will be discussed, by dissecting and inspecting a visualisation (made with Gephi) of a database based on Pool's ego-centred network. I will argue that the two approaches of close and distant reading are inseparable in historical research that makes use of Social Network Analysis.
Rosey E. Pool was born in Amsterdam in 1905, and studied English Literature in Berlin in the 1930s. During the writing of her dissertation, Hitler came to power, and she had to flee. Back in Amsterdam, she worked as a translator and a teacher. In 1943, she was imprisoned at the Westerbork transit camp, but she escaped, and went into hiding. She was one of the few members of her family to survive the Holocaust.
In the 1950s and 1960s, she travelled extensively through the United States as a Fulbright scholar, and worked as a lecturer at black colleges (‘Negro colleges’) in the Deep South. In 1966, she was the only Dutch jury member of the First World Festival of Negro Arts, held in Dakar, Senegal, from 1 to 24 April 1966 (figure 1). This festival was an important and symbolic event in the transnational Négritude movement.
Through her experiences in the Second World War, she felt a deep connection with African Americans. She experienced herself what it was like to be excluded when she wore the yellow Star of David on her clothes: ‘That piece of yellow cotton become my black skin.’1
This feeling of ‘otherness’ led her to become a
member of the Bahá’í Faith in May 1965. A fundamental
teaching in this religion is the concept of unity of
humanity - regardless of gender, race, or class
Before and after her travels to various countries as a
scholar and lecturer, Pool corresponded with many poets,
lecturers, writers and students – most of them African
Americans. The metadata derived from this
correspondence is configured into a pilot dataset, which
will be used here. Around 1500 letters are identified so
far, of which 497 are currently processed into a database.
Hermeneutics from ‘traditional’ historical research will be
used, in what can be called a close reading
The combination of close and distant reading will provide new insights on the links between individual actors in Pool’s network. The limitations of this interdisciplinary research will also be highlighted. This paper presents a critical approach to the question whether Social Network Analysis is useful when reconstructing networks in biographical research. It also investigates whether this research is doable for individual historians working in small projects.
Based on the correspondence archives and
secondary literature, the hypothesis was formulated that
Pool was excluded by a number of people in her network
in the period 1966 to 1971 - the last five years of her life.
The period 1966 to 1968 seems to have been a pivotal
moment in (African) American history. With various race
riots and violent protests, the sixties entered a new phase
coined as the ‘end of a dream’ by various historians
The concept of intersectionality will be used to show
deeper connections between the different actors. This
theory focuses on intersections of social, cultural, gender,
and political structures and identities
The overlap of these identities can cause double
jeopardy or even multiple oppressions. At the same time,
these identities also provide a ground for bonding with
others through ‘collective identity.’ Collective identity is
the ‘shared definition of a group that derives from
members’ common interests, experiences, and solidarity’
The visualisation of Pool’s network will show the intersection of individual identities and collective identities. Thereby relevant clusters can be identified within Pool’s international network. These intersections may provide clues for a focus on certain clusters, which will be examined by a close reading of key letters from her correspondence.
A large amount of biographical data is available for information on persons in Pool’s network. This data is gathered from (a) her correspondence; (b) various biographical dictionaries and biographical sketches in anthologies edited by Rosey E. Pool; and finally (c) obituaries found in (digitised) newspapers.
The primary sources for this research are the letters. This project is a work-in-progress. So far, approximately 1500 letters have been identified, which are derived from public archives and private collections. This material provides a vast amount of information on the various actors in Pool’s network.
Since the amount of data is huge and this research is a small project within a PhD research, a focus is needed. The research is deliberately narrowed to letters that were either sent or received by Rosey E. Pool. 4 Moreover, other media, such as newspaper clippings or visual material, are not included.
This makes the research partial, but not
inadequate. The letters show the interaction between Pool
and the persons with whom she corresponded. By
mapping Pool’s correspondence, quite literally an
ego-centred network
However, some precautions should be taken into
account when working with correspondence. Letters can
provide private and intimate information on both the
sender and recipient. More often, however, letters show
how the sender likes to present him or herself to the
recipient
historical interpretations need to be simplified in binary
terms (‘1’ or ‘0’): letters are either positive or negative;
persons are male or female; etc. This empirical,
positivistic approach seems almost incompatible with
Humanities hermeneutics. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall,
for example, has argued that cultural identity is ‘[n]ot an
essence but a positioning’ - shaped, positioned and
interpreted by discourse
With this in mind, determining the sexual inclination of Pool and the members in her network proves to be highly problematic. For example: Rosey E. Pool lived in Berlin in the 1930s as a married woman, but divorced a couple of years later. From 1948 until her death in 1971, she lived in London with radiologist Ursula ‘Isa’ Isenburg, to whom she referred as her ‘best friend,’ ‘roommate,’ but also ‘vriendin’ (which could be translated as either ‘girlfriend’ or ‘female friend’ – its context is ambiguous). Referring to Pool as ‘homosexual’ or ‘bisexual’ might be a label that she perhaps did not wish to have had.
To discover the sexual inclination of the
historical actors proved to be exceptionally challenging in
this research. The private (sexual) lives of historical
actors often remain hidden, and until the 1970s these
private lives were often seen as irrelevant to include in
biographies or lemmas in biographical dictionaries
The gap between Humanities and empiricist
sciences has lately been a topic of debate amongst
scholars. One notable example has been Johanna Drucker,
who has pleaded for an intuitive Humanities approach in
visualisations
The methodology of constructing and analysing 5 Sussex, SxMs19/1/1, 1-165 Rosey E. Pool to Julia Fields, 9 February 1966.
Each one of the letters is read, examined, and metadata is manually typed into a relational database in Microsoft Access (figure 2). A table for ‘Letters’ includes metadata from the letters on sender, recipient, address, country, main topics, and people and organisations that are mentioned. This procedure is quite time-consuming, but it is necessary since a high number of persons are only referred to in the third person, or by their first name or nickname.
Moreover, a separate table for ‘Persons’ is included,
with various metadata such as date of birth and death,
membership of organisations, religious affiliation(s),
gender, ethnicity, and sexual inclination. 6 These are
registered as personal ‘attributes’ of the nodes. Attributes
are additional information on nodes, which more or less
coincides with ‘identity markers’ in intersectionality
theory
One focal point in this research is the religious affiliation of the individuals. Religions are considered ‘organisations’ in this database. In many instances, the conversion of individuals to a certain religion can be precisely dated. A number of persons in the database converted to the Bahá’í Faith at a certain point in their lives (Pool became a Bahá’í in May 1965; Hayden in 1943). These ‘memberships’ can subsequently be compared to other affiliations or ‘memberships’ in a certain point of time.
Statistical information derived from this data set already shows insightful information on Pool’s correspondence archives. Figure 3, for example, shows 6 For now, it is unfortunately impossible to derive metadata on individuals automatically from online sources, since the information in most entries is insufficient to achieve my goals. 100 that the majority of the letters date from 1967 and 1968. In these years, 28 per cent of the letters were sent by Pool, while 72 per cent were received. Did Pool not reply to the majority of the letters she received? Or are most letters she sent not kept in the archives? More research is required to answer these questions, which lie beyond the scope of this paper.
(received/sent)
The data from the database were imported into Gephi, a
tool for network analysis and visualisation
In this figure, people are represented with ‘nodes’ and the lines (‘edges’) represent the connections the people have maintained through correspondence. The size of the ‘nodes’ and ‘edges’ depends on the amount of interaction they have had with Pool. The design of the nodes has been modified. The red and pink nodes signify the importance of these persons according to the statistical information derived from the database.
Zoomed out visualisations such as these are quite common in Social Network Analysis. However, this visualisation of Pool’s network does not clarify much yet, nor it is very useful for historical research. In this example distant guessing would be a more appropriate term rather than distant reading. Although the sizes of the nodes and edges can give an indication of the interaction in the network, specific questions will not be answered by looking at the Gephi overview. The next step is therefore to apply a close reading, and focus on specific nodes.
The dataset needs to be analysed further to see what the influence of intersecting identities were in Pool’s network. A selection is made from the dataset, depicted in figure 5. These 26 nodes are the largest nodes from figure 4. Although this visualisation only shows around seven per cent of the total sum of nodes (403 in total), these nodes account for almost 60 per cent of all correspondence.
The nodes are then coloured, depicting three
identities in this portion of Pool’s network. The figure
remains vague and does not explain much yet. By
fine-tuning the visualisation
Figure 5 shows that some contacts possess several colours, which makes it hard to grasp collective identities in this group. In figure 6 some key persons are placed in coloured zones, according to their attributes. This is a visualisation of the ‘collective identity’ of the nodes. The overlap between the different zones shows the intersection of different attributes or identity markers.
For the purpose of this article, Pool fits all three categories. This visualisation gives a clear overview of the multidimensionality of Pool’s network that would not have been possible with traditional historical hermeneutics. Yet, the seemingly empirical data that provided the basis for this visualisation has its limitations. I will focus on Pool’s relation to the African American poet Robert Hayden (1913-1980) and Negro Digest editor Hoyt W. Fuller (1923-1981) in the period 1966 to 1971.
A close reading of key letters and contextualisation of these ‘nodes’ demonstrates that some attributes can be emphasised more than others. Especially the Bahá’í Faith will be of great significance. For example, Robert Hayden did not go to the Dakar Festival, but his career was greatly influenced by this event. Fuller’s influence was wider than we might expect at first sight.
Rosey E. Pool was a jury member of the Dakar
Festival. She has indicated that she was personally
responsible for Hayden, one of her personal friends, being
nominated for the Dakar Grand Prix of 1966
Both Pool and Hayden were followers of the Bahá’í Faith. Pool had officially become a follower in May 1965, only a few months before the Dakar Festival. Pool’s statement should be seen within the context of the teachings of the Bahá’í Faith. One fundamental teaching in this religion is the concept of unity of the world and of humanity: all mankind may become ‘as waves of one sea, as leaves and branches of one tree […].’8 The Bahá’í teachings include social ideas on the equality of all human beings - regardless of gender, race or class.
Hayden did not attend the Dakar Festival,
because he was busy preparing a lecture for a conference
on ‘The Image of the Negro in American Literature,’ held
22 April 1966 at Fisk University (Nashville, Tennessee).
Negro Digest quoted Hayden’s lecture, in which he stated
that he refuted the notion that he was a ‘Negro poet.’ The
popular magazine reported that Hayden said he was ‘a
poet who happens to be a Negro.’ Moreover, he was
quoted: ‘Let’s quit saying we’re black writers – writing to
black folks – it has been given importance it should not
have’
Negro Digest’s editor, Hoyt W. Fuller, did visit
the Dakar Festival. In the months prior to the event, he
became an important promoter of the event through his
magazine
This critique should be seen in the context of a period of intensified tensions between African Americans and white Americans. The Dakar Festival already displayed some flaws, heralding the ‘end of a dream’ of the 1960s that became apparent in the years to come. The year 1966 proved to be a turning-point in American history: this was the year that Stokely Carmichael first coined the term ‘Black Power.’ (In October 1966 the Black Panther Party was founded.) Hayden’s ideas on unity and equality no longer fitted in the new era of race politics. 7 Sussex, SxMs19/1/1, 1-193 Rosey E. Pool to the jury of the World Festival of Negro Arts, ca. 1966. 8 Sussex, SxMs19/12/4/2, Baha'i Prayers. R.E.P.'s personal copy with manuscript additions, 'Unity', pp. 111-112.
Fisk, which had caused quite a stir among students and his
colleagues. Eventually he even resigned as a professor of
English at Fisk University. Throughout his life, he
remained undervalued by scholars and literary critics
With the knowledge derived from a close reading of a small number of letters, the overlapping zones can be interpreted differently. The small selection of Pool’s network depicted in figure 6 does not accurately show the influence of Hoyt W. Fuller. His personal involvement in the Dakar Festival and his magazine Negro Digest made him a very influential person in this period - far more than the numbers would suggest. Robert Hayden’s ‘node’ is also quite small. Ironically, this was largely due to his fully packed agenda after winning the Dakar Grand Prix of 1966, something he repeatedly apologises about to Pool in his letters to her.
The shared Bahá’í identity of Pool and Hayden was
a decisive factor in Hayden’s career. The inclusive,
all-encompassing nature of the Bahá’í Faith appears to
have provided a solid basis for a continued
correspondence with Pool in a period of tense race
relations in the United States. The shared religion of Pool
and Hayden could bridge gaps. The Bahá’í Faith
envisions a unity of the world and of humanity and holds
the belief that eventually all religions will be one
This case study aimed to attain more insight in the interactions within the correspondence network of Rosey
E. Pool by focusing on a small number of important nodes. By combining a distant reading and close reading and using specific theories, Social Network Analysis can be quite useful in biographical research. However, the amount of time spent on SNA should not be underestimated. Before endeavouring a likewise project, historians working in small teams need to define a clear hypothesis or scope in advance.
Yet, certain limitations of Social Network Analysis
have not yet been settled. For historians and other scholars
from the Humanities, there remains the problem how to
register ambiguous, versatile information. This research
has not yet included different weight to different types of
letters. How much ‘credits’ would a personal letter get,
compared to an official letter, or holiday postcard?
Moreover, historical changes over time are not visible in
these two-dimensional graphs of historical networks,
although process is made in this field
Although this case study is based upon approximately a third of all available correspondence from and to Rosey E. Pool, the results are promising. This case study shows that the influence of certain collective identities reaches further than others. For now, only a close reading will provide this understanding that a distant reading lacks.
I would like to thank Eric Akkerman and Onno Huber (VU University Amsterdam) for constructing the relational database and their help with the visualisation in Gephi. Moreover, I would like to thank Susan Legêne and Babs Boter for their useful comments on an early version of this paper.
The PhD research Travelling translator. Rosey Pool (1905-1971) a Dutch cultural mobiliser in the ‘transatlantic century’ is being funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
Figure 1 is reproduced with permission of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. All quotations derived from letters from the Rosey Pool Collection are used with permission of the Special Collections at The Keep, University of Sussex. 10. References