=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-1399/paper10 |storemode=property |title=A Visual Analysis of Rosey E. Pool's Correspondence Archives. Biographical Data, Intersectionality, and Social Network Analysis |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1399/paper10.pdf |volume=Vol-1399 |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/bd/Geerlings15 }} ==A Visual Analysis of Rosey E. Pool's Correspondence Archives. Biographical Data, Intersectionality, and Social Network Analysis== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1399/paper10.pdf
             A Visual Analysis of Rosey E. Pool’s Correspondence Archives.
            Biographical Data, Intersectionality, and Social Network Analysis.
                                                  Lonneke Geerlings, MA
                            PhD candidate History, VU University (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
                              Faculty of Humanities, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam
                                               E-mail: a.j.m.geerlings@vu.nl

                                                              Abstract
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.


Keywords: Historical Social Network Analysis (SNA), Correspondence visualisation, Intersectionality



1. Introduction
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               Figure 1: The jury of the Dakar Festival 1966. Rosey E.
Dakar, Senegal, from 1 to 24 April 1966 (figure 1). This                  Pool stands in the middle. Source: Jewish Historical
festival was an important and symbolic event in the                                 Museum, Amsterdam, F010642
transnational Négritude movement.
      Through her experiences in the Second World War,                  2. Research questions
she felt a deep connection with African Americans. She                  Before and after her travels to various countries as a
experienced herself what it was like to be excluded when                scholar and lecturer, Pool corresponded with many poets,
she wore the yellow Star of David on her clothes: ‘That                 lecturers, writers and students – most of them African
piece of yellow cotton become my black skin.’ 1                         Americans. The metadata derived from this
      This feeling of ‘otherness’ led her to become a                   correspondence is configured into a pilot dataset, which
member of the Bahá’í Faith in May 1965. A fundamental                   will be used here. Around 1500 letters are identified so
teaching in this religion is the concept of unity of                    far, of which 497 are currently processed into a database.
humanity - regardless of gender, race, or class (Handal                 Hermeneutics from ‘traditional’ historical research will be
2007:111). The American poet Robert Hayden, a fellow                    used, in what can be called a close reading (Moretti 2005)
Bahá’í, once mentioned in a letter to Pool: ‘I felt so                  of a number of important letters. Also, tools and methods
blessed and so grateful that for us Baha’is it is already one           derived from Social Network Analysis (Borgatti 2013)
world.’2                                                                will be used for quantitative, empirical research. A
                                                                        visualisation of the text corpus will provide material for a
                                                                        distant reading of Pool’s network.
1
  University of Sussex, Special Collections at The Keep, Rosey                   The combination of close and distant reading
Pool Collection, SxMs19/11/1/2 Documentatie Zielen vol soul,            will provide new insights on the links between individual
'Mijn zwarte ziel ....', p. 1                                           actors in Pool’s network. The limitations of this
2
  Sussex, SxMs19/1/1, 1-187, Letter from Robert Hayden to               interdisciplinary research will also be highlighted. This
Rosey E. Pool, 12 August 1966.


                                                                   61
paper presents a critical approach to the question whether            others through ‘collective identity.’ Collective identity is
Social Network Analysis is useful when reconstructing                 the ‘shared definition of a group that derives from
networks in biographical research. It also investigates               members’ common interests, experiences, and solidarity’
whether this research is doable for individual historians             (Taylor, Whittier, 1992:104). This group formation may
working in small projects.                                            also be caused by external forces. By deviating from the
          Based on the correspondence archives and                    rest of society, being ‘not normal,’ a collective identity
secondary literature, the hypothesis was formulated that              can be forced through exclusion (Gamson 2015).
Pool was excluded by a number of people in her network                          The visualisation of Pool’s network will show
in the period 1966 to 1971 - the last five years of her life.         the intersection of individual identities and collective
The period 1966 to 1968 seems to have been a pivotal                  identities. Thereby relevant clusters can be identified
moment in (African) American history. With various race               within Pool’s international network. These intersections
riots and violent protests, the sixties entered a new phase           may provide clues for a focus on certain clusters, which
coined as the ‘end of a dream’ by various historians                  will be examined by a close reading of key letters from
(Marwick 1998:483). These events triggered a period of                her correspondence.
racial polarity, in which Pool felt she was excluded by
many of her African American friends. In her writings,                4. Sources and methodology
she described how she felt her white skin had become a                A large amount of biographical data is available for
political factor which made her a persona non grata. In               information on persons in Pool’s network. This data is
June 1968 Pool wrote to an American friend:                           gathered from (a) her correspondence; (b) various
                                                                      biographical dictionaries and biographical sketches in
    ‘There are strong currents […] against me and the spirit I        anthologies edited by Rosey E. Pool; and finally (c)
    evoke, and some people are trying even to disrupt my              obituaries found in (digitised) newspapers.
    contacts with one or two students whose writing I have                     The primary sources for this research are the
    been trying to stimulate and supervise from afar [...]’3          letters. This project is a work-in-progress. So far,
                                                                      approximately 1500 letters have been identified, which
Yet at the same time some identities proved to be more                are derived from public archives and private collections.
important than others. Religion, and especially the Bahá’í            This material provides a vast amount of information on
Faith, provided an intimate bonding amongst the persons               the various actors in Pool’s network.
in Pool’s network. The main research question of this                          Since the amount of data is huge and this
paper is therefore: can the influence of intersecting                 research is a small project within a PhD research, a focus
identities in Rosey E. Pool’s network be traced using                 is needed. The research is deliberately narrowed to letters
Social Network Analysis? The goal is to attain more                   that were either sent or received by Rosey E. Pool. 4
insight in the interactions within Pool’s network.                    Moreover, other media, such as newspaper clippings or
                                                                      visual material, are not included.
3. Theory: Intersectionality & collective identity                             This makes the research partial, but not
The concept of intersectionality will be used to show                 inadequate. The letters show the interaction between Pool
deeper connections between the different actors. This                 and the persons with whom she corresponded. By
theory focuses on intersections of social, cultural, gender,          mapping Pool’s correspondence, quite literally an
and political structures and identities (Crenshaw 1991).              ego-centred network (Borgatti 2013) will be created. By
The intersections of these axes of power in society help us           analysing her letters on a meta-level, a distant reading
understand the multiple grounds of identity that shape                (Boot 2008) is provided of Pool’s correspondence
experiences. Dichotomies of values (white-black;                      network as she saw it and how she used it.
male-female; heterosexual-gay) are the foundations for                         However, some precautions should be taken into
systems of oppression or discrimination. This theory can              account when working with correspondence. Letters can
be used to analytically capture the multidimensional                  provide private and intimate information on both the
nature and complexity of experiences of historical actors,            sender and recipient. More often, however, letters show
by analysing the different layers of oppression, or: the              how the sender likes to present him or herself to the
‘interlocking systems of oppression’ (Lutz 2011:3). Pool’s            recipient (Boot 2008). The self-fashioning in the letters is
life story encourages the use of this concept: she lived              one of the reasons I have chosen for manually retrieving
together with a woman for over 25 years; she was Jewish;              information from the letters (see next paragraph).
white; middle to upper class; female; a Catholic in the               Moreover, there is a great variety in Pool’s
1940s; a Bahá’í follower in the 1960s; and - during her               correspondence concerning levels of confidentiality. It
many travels - a foreigner.
          The overlap of these identities can cause double            4
                                                                        Including the correspondence of all historical actors is
jeopardy or even multiple oppressions. At the same time,
                                                                      unfortunately an impossible task. For example, one person in
these identities also provide a ground for bonding with
                                                                      Pool’s network is the prominent American intellectual W.E.B.
                                                                      Du Bois, whose archive encompasses over 100,000 letters.
3
 Sussex, SxMs19/1/1, 1-119 Rosey E. Pool to Margaret Danner,          Processing around 10 letters a day, this would be a long-term
26 June 1968.                                                         project.


                                                                 62
includes official documents and private letters, but also           social networks is derived from recent publications
funeral cards. Naturally, letters that are lost or destroyed        (Borgatti 2013) and previous research on network
are not included. Pool herself mentioned casually in one            analysis within social movements (Rosenthal et al. 1985).
letter that her most valuable letters ‘will be preserved for
future generations’ in a number of archives. 5 The
preserved letters therefore provide material for the
persona, the performative construction of one's identity
(Bosch 2012), that Pool presented of herself. But although
the distant reading can only be partial, SNA remains
helpful in gaining more insight in Pool’s international
contacts.
          One major problem in this project is that
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                       Figure 2: Overview of the relational database.
interpreted by discourse (Hall 1990:226). Sociologist                          Screenshot from Microsoft Access.
Barbara Ponse has stressed identity as a positioning in gay
communities as well. Members of gay communities                     5. Overview of the database
expose and recompose their identity and sexuality
                                                                    Each one of the letters is read, examined, and metadata is
differently by continuously adjusting to altering
                                                                    manually typed into a relational database in Microsoft
environments (Ponse 1978).
                                                                    Access (figure 2). A table for ‘Letters’ includes metadata
          With this in mind, determining the sexual
                                                                    from the letters on sender, recipient, address, country,
inclination of Pool and the members in her network
                                                                    main topics, and people and organisations that are
proves to be highly problematic. For example: Rosey E.
                                                                    mentioned. This procedure is quite time-consuming, but it
Pool lived in Berlin in the 1930s as a married woman, but
                                                                    is necessary since a high number of persons are only
divorced a couple of years later. From 1948 until her death
                                                                    referred to in the third person, or by their first name or
in 1971, she lived in London with radiologist Ursula ‘Isa’
                                                                    nickname.
Isenburg, to whom she referred as her ‘best friend,’
                                                                          Moreover, a separate table for ‘Persons’ is included,
‘roommate,’ but also ‘vriendin’ (which could be translated
                                                                    with various metadata such as date of birth and death,
as either ‘girlfriend’ or ‘female friend’ – its context is
                                                                    membership of organisations, religious affiliation(s),
ambiguous). Referring to Pool as ‘homosexual’ or
                                                                    gender, ethnicity, and sexual inclination. 6 These are
‘bisexual’ might be a label that she perhaps did not wish to
                                                                    registered as personal ‘attributes’ of the nodes. Attributes
have had.
                                                                    are additional information on nodes, which more or less
          To discover the sexual inclination of the
                                                                    coincides with ‘identity markers’ in intersectionality
historical actors proved to be exceptionally challenging in
                                                                    theory (Lutz 2011). The attributes will provide clues for
this research. The private (sexual) lives of historical
                                                                    intersecting identities.      Currently the database
actors often remain hidden, and until the 1970s these
                                                                    encompasses 403 ‘nodes’ (persons), a number that is
private lives were often seen as irrelevant to include in
                                                                    likely to increase, possibly up to 1000 persons.
biographies or lemmas in biographical dictionaries
                                                                          One focal point in this research is the religious
(Arthur 2015).
                                                                    affiliation of the individuals. Religions are considered
          The gap between Humanities and empiricist
                                                                    ‘organisations’ in this database. In many instances, the
sciences has lately been a topic of debate amongst
                                                                    conversion of individuals to a certain religion can be
scholars. One notable example has been Johanna Drucker,
                                                                    precisely dated. A number of persons in the database
who has pleaded for an intuitive Humanities approach in
                                                                    converted to the Bahá’í Faith at a certain point in their
visualisations (Drucker 2011). In this paper, I try to
                                                                    lives (Pool became a Bahá’í in May 1965; Hayden in
overcome the reducing of interpretations into a single fact
                                                                    1943). These ‘memberships’ can subsequently be
by ‘tagging’ the subjectivity and versatility of letters. By
                                                                    compared to other affiliations or ‘memberships’ in a
doing this, I agree with Scott Weingart’s notion that we
                                                                    certain point of time.
‘may lose some of the uniquely human information
                                                                          Statistical information derived from this data set
relevant to Humanities research, but what we lose in
                                                                    already shows insightful information on Pool’s
specificity we gain in rigor’ (Weingart 2011).
                                                                    correspondence archives. Figure 3, for example, shows
          The methodology of constructing and analysing
                                                                    6
                                                                      For now, it is unfortunately impossible to derive metadata on
5
 Sussex, SxMs19/1/1, 1-165 Rosey E. Pool to Julia Fields, 9         individuals automatically from online sources, since the
February 1966.                                                      information in most entries is insufficient to achieve my goals.


                                                               63
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.



            Total amount of letters per year
                    (received/sent)
 100
  80
  60
                                                    Received
  40                                                Sent
  20
   0


                                                                        Figure 4: General overview network Rosey E. Pool.
  Figure 3: Graph showing amount of letters per year,
                                                                                     Visualised using Gephi.
ordered by sent and received. 94.6% of processed letters
      are included; dates of other 5.4% unknown.
                                                                      7. Close reading of three key ‘nodes’
6. Visualisation using Gephi                                          The dataset needs to be analysed further to see what the
                                                                      influence of intersecting identities were in Pool’s
The data from the database were imported into Gephi, a
                                                                      network. A selection is made from the dataset, depicted in
tool for network analysis and visualisation (Bastian et al.
                                                                      figure 5. These 26 nodes are the largest nodes from figure
2009). Gephi can be used to import, visualise, spatialise,
                                                                      4. Although this visualisation only shows around seven
filter, manipulate, and export various types of networks.
                                                                      per cent of the total sum of nodes (403 in total), these
Since Rosey E. Pool is solely defined as either ‘sender’ or
                                                                      nodes account for almost 60 per cent of all
‘recipient,’ this will lead to an ego-centred network.
                                                                      correspondence.
Figure 4 shows a visualisation of all the nodes within the
                                                                            The nodes are then coloured, depicting three
ego-centred correspondence network, with Rosey E. Pool
                                                                      identities in this portion of Pool’s network. The figure
in the centre.
                                                                      remains vague and does not explain much yet. By
       In this figure, people are represented with ‘nodes’
                                                                      fine-tuning the visualisation (Lima 2011), the intersecting
and the lines (‘edges’) represent the connections the
                                                                      and overlapping identities become visible, and thereby the
people have maintained through correspondence. The size
                                                                      foundations for collective identity formation become
of the ‘nodes’ and ‘edges’ depends on the amount of
                                                                      visible.
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.



                                                                       Figure 5: Three attributes combined in separate nodes.
                                                                                      Visualised using Gephi.

                                                                 64
                                                                             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 (Pool
                                                                       1966:43; Pool 1983). He won the prestigious award,
                                                                       which instantly turned him into a famous poet and popular
                                                                       speaker. In a recommendation to the other jury members
                                                                       in early 1966, Pool recommended Hayden by stating that
                                                                       Hayden’s star was shining, not only ‘among the poets of
                                                                       his race but among English-language poets at large.’7 She
                                                                       thereby by-passed the problematic notion whether Robert
                                                                       Hayden excelled as a poet – or as a black poet.
                                                                                 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
        Figure 6: Detail of network Rosey E. Pool.                     humanity: all mankind may become ‘as waves of one sea,
                  Visualised using Gephi                               as leaves and branches of one tree […].’ 8 The Bahá’í
                                                                       teachings include social ideas on the equality of all human
For now the focus will be on a small number of personal                beings - regardless of gender, race or class.
attributes. Three identity markers will be of special                            Hayden did not attend the Dakar Festival,
interest here: (1, yellow) members of the Bahá’í Faith in              because he was busy preparing a lecture for a conference
Pool’s network, and (2, red) persons in her network that               on ‘The Image of the Negro in American Literature,’ held
are lesbian, gay, or bisexual. (Pool is also placed in this            22 April 1966 at Fisk University (Nashville, Tennessee).
category, bear in mind the objections made in paragraph                Negro Digest quoted Hayden’s lecture, in which he stated
4). Finally, (3, green) the people that visited the First              that he refuted the notion that he was a ‘Negro poet.’ The
World Festival of Negro Arts, held in Dakar. This last                 popular magazine reported that Hayden said he was ‘a
attribute is not a social, cultural, or political identity or a        poet who happens to be a Negro.’ Moreover, he was
gender. Yet, the event was closely interwoven with the                 quoted: ‘Let’s quit saying we’re black writers – writing to
Négritude movement that dealt with racism and black                    black folks – it has been given importance it should not
emancipation. This symbolic event for the emancipation                 have’ (Llorens 1966).
of African countries possibly provided a foundation for                          Negro Digest’s editor, Hoyt W. Fuller, did visit
bonding with others, by forming a ‘collective identity’ of             the Dakar Festival. In the months prior to the event, he
‘Dakar visitors.’                                                      became an important promoter of the event through his
      Figure 5 shows that some contacts possess several                magazine (Ratcliff 2014:172). Fuller blamed Hayden for
colours, which makes it hard to grasp collective identities            not attending the Dakar Festival. Afterwards, Negro
in this group. In figure 6 some key persons are placed in              Digest started (in the eyes of Hayden) a hate campaign
coloured zones, according to their attributes. This is a               against Hayden, for blackness was something that should
visualisation of the ‘collective identity’ of the nodes. The           be celebrated, not something that one should be ashamed
overlap between the different zones shows the                          of. Hayden’s absence in Dakar was seen as evidence that
intersection of different attributes or identity markers.              he kept aloof of his race.
      For the purpose of this article, Pool fits all three                       This critique should be seen in the context of a
categories. This visualisation gives a clear overview of               period of intensified tensions between African Americans
the multidimensionality of Pool’s network that would not               and white Americans. The Dakar Festival already
have been possible with traditional historical                         displayed some flaws, heralding the ‘end of a dream’ of
hermeneutics. Yet, the seemingly empirical data that                   the 1960s that became apparent in the years to come. The
provided the basis for this visualisation has its limitations.         year 1966 proved to be a turning-point in American
I will focus on Pool’s relation to the African American                history: this was the year that Stokely Carmichael first
poet Robert Hayden (1913-1980) and Negro Digest editor                 coined the term ‘Black Power.’ (In October 1966 the
Hoyt W. Fuller (1923-1981) in the period 1966 to 1971.                 Black Panther Party was founded.) Hayden’s ideas on
      A close reading of key letters and contextualisation             unity and equality no longer fitted in the new era of race
of these ‘nodes’ demonstrates that some attributes can be              politics.
emphasised more than others. Especially the Bahá’í Faith
will be of great significance. For example, Robert Hayden              7
                                                                         Sussex, SxMs19/1/1, 1-193 Rosey E. Pool to the jury of the
did not go to the Dakar Festival, but his career was greatly
                                                                       World Festival of Negro Arts, ca. 1966.
influenced by this event. Fuller’s influence was wider                 8
                                                                         Sussex, SxMs19/12/4/2, Baha'i Prayers. R.E.P.'s personal copy
than we might expect at first sight.
                                                                       with manuscript additions, 'Unity', pp. 111-112.


                                                                  65
         Hayden was highly criticised for his lecture at             E. Pool by focusing on a small number of important
Fisk, which had caused quite a stir among students and his           nodes. By combining a distant reading and close reading
colleagues. Eventually he even resigned as a professor of            and using specific theories, Social Network Analysis can
English at Fisk University. Throughout his life, he                  be quite useful in biographical research. However, the
remained undervalued by scholars and literary critics                amount of time spent on SNA should not be
(Conniff 1999:489). In a letter to Rosey E. Pool, dated 25           underestimated. Before endeavouring a likewise project,
April 1969, Hayden wrote:                                            historians working in small teams need to define a clear
                                                                     hypothesis or scope in advance.
    ‘I know how you must feel nowadays in regard to the                    Yet, certain limitations of Social Network Analysis
    "black revolution." I share your feelings, as, again, you        have not yet been settled. For historians and other scholars
    certainly know. So much of it has become ugly, ugly and          from the Humanities, there remains the problem how to
    false, and I am appalled by the downright Nazi tactics           register ambiguous, versatile information. This research
    which the so-called militants are using in the name of           has not yet included different weight to different types of
    freedom. I no longer read Negro Digest, because I refuse         letters. How much ‘credits’ would a personal letter get,
    to support racism, and I am unalterably opposed to any           compared to an official letter, or holiday postcard?
    form of regimentation.’9                                         Moreover, historical changes over time are not visible in
                                                                     these two-dimensional graphs of historical networks,
The Bahá’í Faith sustained him in coping with the ‘racists’          although process is made in this field (Lemercier 2014).
and ‘black fascists,’ who, according to Hayden, made a                         Although this case study is based upon
distinction solely based on skin colour and promoted                 approximately a third of all available correspondence
separatism.10 In the spring 1969 he had been appointed               from and to Rosey E. Pool, the results are promising. This
professor at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. This            case study shows that the influence of certain collective
was a special occasion, since it was the ‘first time the             identities reaches further than others. For now, only a
honor has been conferred on one of Us.’ In this letter, ‘Us’         close reading will provide this understanding that a
refers to ‘Bahá’í’s’.                                                distant reading lacks.
      With the knowledge derived from a close reading of
a small number of letters, the overlapping zones can be              9. Acknowledgements
interpreted differently. The small selection of Pool’s               I would like to thank Eric Akkerman and Onno Huber
network depicted in figure 6 does not accurately show the            (VU University Amsterdam) for constructing the
influence of Hoyt W. Fuller. His personal involvement in             relational database and their help with the visualisation in
the Dakar Festival and his magazine Negro Digest made                Gephi. Moreover, I would like to thank Susan Legêne and
him a very influential person in this period - far more than         Babs Boter for their useful comments on an early version
the numbers would suggest. Robert Hayden’s ‘node’ is                 of this paper.
also quite small. Ironically, this was largely due to his                  The PhD research Travelling translator. Rosey Pool
fully packed agenda after winning the Dakar Grand Prix               (1905-1971) a Dutch cultural mobiliser in the
of 1966, something he repeatedly apologises about to                 ‘transatlantic century’ is being funded by the Netherlands
Pool in his letters to her.                                          Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
      The shared Bahá’í identity of Pool and Hayden was                    Figure 1 is reproduced with permission of the Jewish
a decisive factor in Hayden’s career. The inclusive,                 Historical Museum in Amsterdam. All quotations derived
all-encompassing nature of the Bahá’í Faith appears to               from letters from the Rosey Pool Collection are used with
have provided a solid basis for a continued                          permission of the Special Collections at The Keep,
correspondence with Pool in a period of tense race                   University of Sussex.
relations in the United States. The shared religion of Pool
and Hayden could bridge gaps. The Bahá’í Faith                       10. References
envisions a unity of the world and of humanity and holds
                                                                     Secondary sources
the belief that eventually all religions will be one (Hansell
1979:24). To quote Hayden once more: ‘for us Baha’is it              Arthur, P. (2015) Re-imagining a Nation Using
is already one world.’11                                               Biographical Data, Keynote lecture at the Workshop
                                                                       Biographical Data in a Digital World, Amsterdam.
8. Conclusion                                                        Bastian, M., Heymann, S. and Jacomy, M. (2009). Gephi:
                                                                       An Open Source Software for Exploring and
This case study aimed to attain more insight in the
                                                                       Manipulating       Networks.       International   AAAI
interactions within the correspondence network of Rosey
                                                                       Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
                                                                     Boot, P. (2008). Te groot voor het blote oog. Over
9
  Sussex, SxMs19/1/1, 1-191 Robert Hayden to Rosey E. Pool,            interactie visualisatie in de studie van correspondenties.
25 April 1969.                                                         Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde,
10
   Sussex, SxMs19/1/1, 1-189 Robert Hayden to Rosey E. Pool,           124(3), pp. 201--210.
18 October 1967.                                                     Borgatti, S.P.; Everett, M.G. and Johnson, J.C. (2013),
11
   Sussex, SxMs19/1/1, 1-187 Robert Hayden to Rosey E. Pool,           Analyzing Social Networks. London [etc.]: SAGE.
12 August 1966.                                                      Bosch, M. (2012). Persona en de performance van

                                                                66
  identiteit. Parallelle ontwikkelingen in de nieuwe                Rosenthal, N.; Fingrutd, M.; Ethier, M.; Karant, R. and
  biografische geschiedschrijving van gender en van                   McDonald, D. (1985). Social Movements and Network
  wetenschap. Tijdschrift voor Biografie, 1(3), pp.                   Analysis: A Case Study of Nineteenth-Century
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