Science Networks of Letters

Definition

Before the scientific journal, the peer review process or the learned society had assumed their modern forms, natural philosophy was conducted by correspondence. The Republic of Letters — Respublica literaria — was the name contemporaries gave to this: a self-consciously international, self-governing community of scholars who knew each other largely through the post, and whose letters served simultaneously as publication, review, dispute, news service and social introduction.

How It Worked

A letter in this system was rarely a private communication. It was expected to be read aloud, copied, excerpted and forwarded, and its author wrote knowing this. Priority claims were established by letter — sometimes by anagram, so that a discovery could be dated without being disclosed. Experimental results were reported in enough detail to be replicated. Objections were raised, answered and circulated.

Certain figures functioned as hubs, and the network's structure depended on them. Marin Mersenne in Paris corresponded with more than seventy scholars across Europe and deliberately relayed material between people who did not know one another, effectively operating as a one-man clearing house. Henry Oldenburg, first secretary of the Royal Society, maintained a similar correspondence and in 1665 converted it into an institution: Philosophical Transactions began as the printed, periodical form of the letters he was already receiving and forwarding, and in doing so created both the scientific journal and, in his editorial practice of soliciting expert opinion, the germ of peer review.

Its Norms

The Republic of Letters maintained norms that are recognisably those of modern science, and it maintained them without any enforcement mechanism whatever:

• Openness. Results were to be communicated rather than kept, in explicit contrast to the secrecy of alchemical and craft traditions.
• Civility. Disputes were to be conducted in a shared register — sometimes strained past breaking, as in the Newton–Leibniz priority quarrel.
• Merit over rank. The community claimed, with mixed success, to weigh arguments rather than social station, which made it one of the few European institutions in which a lens-grinder and a nobleman corresponded as colleagues.
• Reciprocity. The system ran on obligation. A letter answered created a debt; a letter unanswered was a considerable insult.

The norms were also bounded: participation required Latin or French, literacy, leisure, postal access and, overwhelmingly, being male, and the small number of women who participated did so on markedly harder terms.

Digital Reconstruction

Stanford's Mapping the Republic of Letters project has reconstructed these networks quantitatively from correspondence metadata — sender, recipient, place, date — for figures including Voltaire, Locke, Franklin and d'Alembert. The results have revised some standard assumptions, notably by showing that the Enlightenment's correspondence was considerably more regionally concentrated, and less pan-European, than its participants' own rhetoric of a borderless republic suggested.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

This is the closest historical analogue to a distributed, text-based, asynchronous knowledge community, and it is a useful corrective to the assumption that such things are a product of networked computing. It also supplies a warning: the Republic of Letters' openness was real, and so was its exclusivity, and the two were produced by the same infrastructure. Any account of an online community that describes its openness without describing what its access requirements filter out is telling half the story.

Related Reading

• Pierre Lévy
• Ambient Socialization
• Cultural Resource Management
• Time and Space