Humorous happenings, scandalous stories, triumphant travels and much more are nestled away within the nearly 3,000 letters Rosalind Beiler and her collaborators have pored over.
Beiler, an associate professor of history, is leading the People, Religion, Information Networks and Travel (PRINT) project to trace communication and migration networks of lesser-known 17th and 18th century European religious groups and expand access to historical records for everyone.
She is working with co-leads from UCF’s Center for Humanities and Digital Research Amy Larner Giroux, associate director, and Brook Miller, applications developer; UCF’s librarians; a team of students; and about 1,800 citizen scholar volunteers to bring these stories to life and develop deeper connections to history.
For this work, Beiler also utilizes the resources of UCF’s Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR), which is a collaborative research hub within the College of Arts and Humanities that provides specialized technical support to faculty and students.
PRINT isn’t simply transferring text from a letter into a dull database. The researchers are creating a publicly accessible archive that better visualizes movements and connections of letter writers and linking them to other people and places. The historians say they are confident that this can help further both scholarly and personal genealogical research.
Visualizing the Past to Enrich the Present
Translating and transcribing correspondence from groups such as Anabaptists, Quakers and Pietists requires careful international collaboration and access to repositories in Germany, the Netherlands, the United States and the United Kingdom.
“We’re working with archivists in each of those repositories, and they are sending us images of the letters and the metadata we need in order to be able to make them accessible,” Beiler says.
In some cases, they are scanning the images and creating metadata themselves.
The letters were not necessarily the musings of monarchs or other figureheads, but of common people who we today may still find relatable, she adds. For this reason, the PRINT project is a worthy endeavor, Beiler says.
“The people in these letters are mostly ordinary people, and they’re going through things just like we are today,” she says. “Seeing that sort of human story is one of the things that I think is really important about this project — we are making those stories accessible by making these personal letters widely available.”
PRINT’s history began in 2016 as Beiler became intrigued as she noticed patterns of people and groups corresponding and the networks increasingly became complex. Seeing religious, economic and social connections inspired her to apply for a grant to take things a step further.
“I was finding all of these connections between people that were overlapping and intersecting, and they functioned much like a kaleidoscope,” Beiler says. “I couldn’t visualize them on a two-dimensional page.”
The project is entering its third year of funding by the U.S. National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
“In 2023, we received the award to actually work with the archives to make the letters accessible and use digital tools to analyze and visualize them,” Beiler says. “Now, we’re starting to plot them on a map and use social network analysis to better understand the connections between these people.”
Bridging Technology and the Past
Once the letters are compiled and transcribed by volunteers, CHDR researchers, Giroux and CHDR applications programmer Brook Miller work to synthesize them with network analysis and mapping tools.
So far, the PRINT model is one of the most complex and interesting models CHDR has designed, Miller says.
“Whether you’re viewing the data in map format, whether you’re seeing how the different groups interacted with one another over time or whether you’re actually looking at the network connections between people, it’s really exciting to be able to see not just individual data points, but to see the connections and the changes over time within the data,” he says.
Miller and the CHDR staff will harness and maintain a database containing open data links to where all the letters are hosted to depict them in a more visually appealing and organized format. They’re also working on creating an automated metadata pipeline where future users will be able to add to PRINT.
The evolution of digitization and database management technologies allow work such as PRINT to become reality, Miller says.
“I think that the sophistication of the network analysis and mapping tools means that you can look a lot more granularly, and you can actually extract some quantitative information about the relationship between various entities within the data, and then see how that data changes through time,” he says.
Surprise Discoveries and Student Research
Graduate student researcher Kailey Freeman-DePelisi ’25 and history master’s alum Adaeze Nwigwe ’25MA are part of the PRINT digital archiving team. Through the project, they have further enriched their understanding of public history as they pursue their degrees.
Since Spring 2024, Freeman-DePelisi is working to illuminate the lives of Dutch Anabaptists through the Amsterdam repository.
“I have had a really great experience,” she says. “You get to see history at a much smaller scale and see everyday life you may have never seen otherwise. You can actually follow them from places like Switzerland to the Netherlands and you can see who they are as a person.”
Freeman-DePelisi says the research is preparing her to continue to public history education and provide her with the skills she can translate into a successful career.
“I’ve had a chance to do an undergraduate thesis here, which will prepare me for a graduate thesis later,” she says. “Learning how to communicate with other people and work in a team is valuable too.”
Nwigwe was perusing Quaker letters and incidentally found a will dispute that contained a surprising revelation.
“I found out the man, Ralph Smith, was the gardener to William Penn, [founder of Pennsylvania], so he had more significant connections than I initially thought,” Nwigwe says. “There were all these people involved in his will who were trying to settle what happened after his death. They were so interconnected in this small community.”
Navigating the letters revealed a network of people who shed light on the legal history of different groups in Britain and America and how they deviated from what was considered traditional at the time.
The number of irregularities prompted Nwigwe to delve deeper into the dispute, which culminated in a forthcoming research paper on the topic.
“I was trying to piece it all together and I discovered that it was more complicated than it seemed,” she says. “That’s what inspired me to look at further records — death records, marriage records and further books and genealogies.”
Nwigwe says her work with PRINT has helped her become a better researcher, and it deepened her connection with history. She even visited Pennsbury Manor, where Penn lived and Smith worked, to better contextualize her research.
“It’s great that I was able to get such an experience here,” Nwigwe says. “When it comes to research for my career, it helped me realize that you have to use critical thinking to see what’s most probable when looking at primary sources. This project was able to combine a lot of these skills and give me a way to find such a great story within history, and it was great in a career-building sense. It showed us what we can do as public historians.”
Beiler says she estimates that it will take about two more years to build out the database and refine it enough so that it’s user-friendly. She encourages people interested in learning more or volunteering to visit printmigrationnetwork.org.
Researcher’s Credentials
Beiler is an associate professor of history at UCF. Her publications include Immigrant and Entrepreneur: The Atlantic World of Caspar Wistar, 1650-1750 (2008) and articles about migration within early modern Europe and to the British colonies. Her current research is about the communication networks of religious dissenters and the dynamic ways they shaped migration flows. She has been a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University; a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Free University, Berlin; a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia; and a visiting professor at the International Research and Training Group at Trier University.
