[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] So I'm very happy to and pleased to have Ruth Ann with us today for this third annual, uh, Digital Enlightenment Studies lecture.
We're really taking a broad view of the enlightenment, uh, in that sense.
But that's, uh, that's fine.
Ruth is a professor of literary history and digital humanities at the Queen Mary, uh, and probably best known, at least in some circles, for her, uh,
directorship of the living with machines project, which was the UK Ukri, uh,
big deal for five years between the British Library and the Turing Institute, which did all sorts of wonderful things.
I'm sure we'll hear a bit about it. Uh, she's also worked a lot on the Tudor papers with her partner, Sebastian.
Wonderful book. That was out a few years ago.
Uh, Tudor Networks of Power and, uh, and a wonderful little book, uh, that I use a lot in teaching, uh, called the Network Turn with, uh,
Scott Weinger and Nicole Coleman and Sebastian, which I recommend highly, uh,
and has done great work for, uh, proselytising network analysis for the humanities.
And it's wonderful. So we're very happy to have Ruth here today. Uh, please join me in welcoming.
And thank you so much to Glen for inviting me.
Um, today I want to share some work that I'm kind of just completing, although I've been tinkering with that for about ten years, embarrassingly.
Um, so it's a research problem that sits at the intersection of archival studies and early modern history and digital humanities.
The problem of aliases.
Specifically, I'll be thinking about how we might identify people hidden behind aliases in large scale correspondence collections,
and what happens when we bring computational methods to bear on that challenge.
So as you see, the material I work on is a 16th century.
So not very enlightenment, but the methods I'm going to show you today kind of are applicable to correspondence collections of any period.
So my argument is that aliases are a natural consequence of communication.
So as new communication technologies emerge, so do techniques to evade surveillance.
Today we have things like encrypted messaging apps, anonymous browsers and burner phones.
But that dynamic is not a new one. So in the early modern period, the technologies were paper and ink,
and there were a variety of technologies employed to evade scrutiny, including the alias.
Now, while some browser technologies have been built for whistleblowers, journalists and just normal people who want to,
um, avoid being, uh, surveilled, they're also, of course, used by criminals.
And in much the same way the evidence left in archives shows us the aliases we use, but for a variety of reasons.
But abuse by state agents and spies, they were used by conspirators,
but also authors and theologians expressing opinions that might have been controversial.
Now intersection of letters was actually a fairly widespread practice in the early modern period.
So, um, in a study I did with Rachel Madeira and Sebastian on at MIT, my longtime collaborator and partner,
um, we showed that in excess of 5% of papers in, in the Elizabethan set papers foreign were intercept.
So we developed a new method to show this. Um, and that's a lot, uh, and because this was a very real threat for people sending letters,
various technologies evolved to protect letters from prying eyes.
The most famous histories of conspiracy in this period period are littered with those technologies and strategies.
We might think of the Babington Plot that you probably have heard of,
which was the the means by which Mary, Queen of Scots was ultimately brought down.
This was um, employed encrypted letters. Um, it said, between aliases often hidden in beer barrels.
And these were intercepted, copied, uh, by the double agent, uh, Gilbert Gifford, uh,
who was also known by various names and deciphered by Walsingham as code breaker Thomas Phillips.
We'll hear a bit more about later.
Other strategies employed in this period were things like a letter lock, in, which you might think of as a tamper evident technology.
But beyond these dramatic episodes, aliases were a widespread use.
And this because of that, that we've come to this, um, this method.
So if historians and users present three kinds of challenge.
So this first, this aliases that actually haven't been solved.
The second is aliases that have been identified in scholarship, but for which the information has not been folded back into finding Aids.
Um, or it's not easily discoverable, uh, for other scholars.
The third is where the identity of the aliases are disputed or theories are difficult to verify.
And so what I want to present today is, um, a computational heuristic, uh,
designed to address these challenges, which I co-developed with, with Sebastian.
Um, and the method doesn't solve aliases automatically.
I'm not really in the method of kind of automatic methods. Instead, it generates candidate matches.
Uh, that helps guide the story in allowing them to kind of test and explore and refine hypotheses.
We developed this method on the data behind, uh, to the networks of power projects.
So this book, um, applies quantitative network analysis,
but also other computational methods to the study of, uh, the letters in the Tudor State Papers.
Um, so these started out as the working papers of the secretaries of state.
Um, they've been catalogued and they were digitised as state papers online.
And because, uh, if we if we, um, subscribe to these kinds of resources, we can actually ask the underlying data.
So we ask the underlying data, uh, the XML and the scans.
And from that we extracted 182,747 letters, uh, which were from and to over 20,000 people spread across Europe and beyond.
But that kind of quick overview of the data belies what was, uh, a long and arduous data cleaning process.
Um, 18 months probably. Um, we first needed to clean people's names, needs to disambiguate them and duplicate them.
We needed to do the same for place names. We also enriched the data.
We sort of geocode the places. We added linked data to people.
Um, so that the book we have an interactive visualisation now, aliases were part of that data cleaning process.
And we might think of aliases as a kind of advanced deduplication problem.
Uh, because people are known by multiple names designed to avoid being collapsed onto one identity.
And we can see exactly the kind of problem that that poses for us, uh, with the visualisation in this next figure.
Um, so this, um, is a network visualisation of the different aliases that have been attributed,
uh, with different levels of, uh, controversy to a man called William Sterile.
And I'm going to come back to the tricky, this tricky character, um, later in the talk.
But what you need to know now is that all of the yellow nodes have been suggested as aliases of sterile,
and if they were collapsed, the network would look like this.
Uh, but they have not. Um, so, uh, this shows you exactly what aliases do they have the function of breaking connections and network,
obscuring identities and creating dead ends not only for anyone surveilling the letter writers,
but also for any historians later working with those archives.
Um, and, hey, uh, the the sort of, um, leftmost, uh, two little they're called dyads where you've got an,
um, an an entity with two, two nodes connected with one edge.
They're the kind of perfect case. What's happening here is the alias is used so strictly, um, that they are directional as well.
That person A, writing to person B is probably using a different alias for person than person B, writing to person I.
If you use a system like this perfectly, it's very, very, very difficult to collapse it back into the kind of network I just showed you.
But fortunately, people are lazy. People make mistakes.
Um, and so once we can start piecing together little bits of evidence to start collapsing the network together, this is where our method comes in.
So that network visualisation of sterile aliases and neighbours showed us the problem.
But networks also offer a solution through the method of quantitative network analysis.
And so the idea, the idea behind a heuristic is if x communicates x, y and x communicates with z,
but y and z do not communicate, it is possible they are the same person.
And this builds on a theory by um, grant of assets like his stand out publication.
It's like massively cited uh, courts for the strength of weak ties.
But in that publication, he has something called the forbidden triad.
Um, and he says, um, that, uh, if X and Y correspond and, um, and sorry, that's a little bit if if X has strong social ties with Y and Z,
there will also be some kind of social tie, either weak or strong, between y and Z.
And he describes social networks where there was an absence of the y z type as the forbidden triad,
precisely because it deviates from observed patterns in social network data.
So we're kind of riffing on that theory. So for those of you who might be familiar with the state papers or other kinds of state collections,
you might be thinking of reasons why there wouldn't be connections between Y
and Z precisely because they started out as the Secretary of State's papers.
Do you not think of Secretary of State as the X note? Um, that's true, but the state papers also folded in all sorts of other administrative packets.
Um, uh, and it, uh, it did lots of interception.
It sees lots of people's private ah, correspondence meaning that very frequently we find that triads are, in fact, closed.
So open triads are a clue to us. Um, and that's why we begin.
So this is how the method works. So the method, very simply put, systematically searches for open triads amongst the 20,000 plus notes.
Now we developed two variants of this method because we have kind of different alias problems that we know about or might be looking for.
So the first one begins the designated identity. That's a suspected alias, something like an initial or a or a symbol.
Um. Uh, and this returns as a single list of people that fulfil the criteria, that is,
pairs of correspondence that are unconnected but which share neighbours.
We also developed the second variant, which is a kind of more exploratory research tool, which might begin with a given,
uh, person in the network who's known to, uh, correspond with people who might have used aliases.
Um, what we do is we, we scour their entire neighbourhood for people who fulfil that criteria,
i.e. people who don't, who share neighbours better correspond with one another.
And what that gives us is a list of pairs of nodes to explore.
Uh, what we need to do is verify all of those, uh, candidates.
And as this description shows, the method is, uh, necessarily a very simple heuristic.
Um, uh, the suggested matches for each candidate can often be numerous, especially around secretaries of state.
Uh, but when trying to make matches where evidence is uncertain and indeed designated to, uh, evade scrutiny,
um, it is better to have lots of false negatives and to find a few positive matches amongst them.
So that's why we're kind of designed as that kind of open net kind of approach.
And as I've suggested, a crucial step in this methodology therefore is verification.
So each candidate has to be checked by one by one, of course, and can compose as many puzzles as answers.
In some cases the identity can be verified by handwriting, um, by endorsements, um where internal information acts giveaway.
And also we might look to contextual information where we know that a given person is in a given place at a certain time,
and makes it likely that they would have access to that knowledge.
And as of suggested, this method works best on regions of the network that have small information hubs like diplomats,
more miners, secretaries, um agents, unknown conspirators.
Uh, as I'll discuss the next few minutes when dealing with um people, agents associated with a principal secretary.
The method often presents us hundreds of candidates, which take longer to work through, uh, but still is useful.
Um, but, um, in all cases, what this method does is it makes tractable something that is a very,
very large and complex problem and actually makes it not suitable, uh, for users.
So let's begin looking at the method in action.
Uh, sprinkled with the state papers, uh, tantalising letters in which the senders or recipients are identified by initials,
symbols, or vaguely described as an intelligence that will spy.
Many of these figures, unsurprisingly, sit within the orbit of principal secretaries, channelling sensitive political and military information.
Yes, precisely. The proximity to power that makes alias is used in these contexts so difficult to unravel.
So the nature of the challenge becomes clear when we look at a few examples.
Um, and it's quite good to show you where there has been a proposal in scholarship, because it allows us to kind of test a hypothesis.
Um, and specifically one we're using here is one that hasn't been folded back into the, into, uh, the finding aid.
So in the state papers, it looks like a separate identity.
Um, so in the case of the method, returns a 704 candidate.
So that's quite a lot. Um, but crucially, it does include Robert Barnard, um, who's already proposed in scholarship.
Um, and that identification is strengthened, uh, by handwriting comparison with an earlier letter signed by Barnard.
Um, by what we know of his career. He also operated under other aliases.
So things like Robert Woodward, Robert Wood, and he was a double agent working for Walsingham and is known after the Babington Plot.
Now it makes a useful case for testing, um, the method, um, it shows us, uh,
that the method can return us the right answer, but amongst a lot of candidates.
And we can narrow this by looking at kind of narrowing the temporal window,
which often narrows things down to something like 20 or 40, uh, matches instead.
But it does also show us the power of the alias, how you can hide in plain sight because of the crowd that around you.
Now. What alias is used in correspondence to secretaries often generate daunting candidate lists.
The method gives us much more uh.
Uh tractable candidate lists when applied to cases connected to less prolific correspondence, but often still gives us implausible answers.
And so there's a couple of examples we have here.
We have the case of NB, um, which was either not been solved or not, is very difficult to discover in scholarship.
Um, he wrote to Thomas Phillips in 1584.
We get 18 candidates back, uh, including Thomas Bond's.
Um, and we find an endorsement to B. And we know that Phillips often used that to signify bonds.
Another example is HB, uh, which is slightly more tentative, but I think is still the correct response.
He wrote to William Davidson, who was, um, the, uh, agent in the Netherlands.
He was a diplomat in the Netherlands in this period. And among the candidates, I think it was exactly 100 candidates, actually.
Uh, we find Nicholas Breunig, um, and this is very possible because he sent Davidson two letters in roughly the same period.
Um, it's similarly written in French. It has a very comparable hand, though not identical.
And the way that runic uh, styles is n is very like an H.
So the C, it feels like a feasible, uh, match. Now,
the payoff of resolving such aliases lies in what it allows us to see once identities
are consolidated in a network topology previously fractured and obscured.
Um, it becomes legible. Um, and for us to understand the full scope of a person's contacts, reach and access to knowledge.
And sometimes this also, uh, exposes a different side of a figure that we thought we knew.
Uh, one such case is the alias 88.
Um, so here we get a really huge, uh, candidate list.
But fortunately, I found what I thought was the solution within the within the first 100.
Uh, and this is on the basis of handwriting and then finding a valediction that was identical to the one used by Jack LeClair.
Um, and so, to our knowledge, this hasn't been identified before. And it gives us new information about Japan's, uh, covert diplomacy.
Uh, what makes this case particularly interesting is that Japan is not one of Walsingham, the shadowy intelligences.
He was. Um, in fact, uh, Secretary of state to Henry of Navarre.
So earlier the same year, 1588, Japan had written openly to both Walsingham and Berkeley seeking support, uh,
for Navarre, um, during the Eighth War of religion, which was fought over the right to the French throne.
And the letter from eight. The HD eight S is markedly different from those earlier letters, um, from, uh, Japan.
Um, we we might think of it as kind of, um, quite oblique.
Um, it's so hard to understand the meaning as the the catalogue editor dramatically writes, if I understand this dark letter a right,
it points out the measures for keeping the king and evar constant to the, uh, puts the party.
So it's quite hard to see what's being said is kind of hidden.
Um, and it's very clear that, um, uh, Japan is not acting in his capacity as the secretary of state anymore.
Rather, he's actually coordinating with a foreign power to manage intense pressure on Navarre to convert to Catholicism in order to see,
uh, secure the throne. Uh, and we know that he did not ultimately, um, convert to Catholicism in 1593.
But this letter from the 88 alias suggests that there were already reasons to suspect that he would convert back in 1588,
thereby frustrating plans for a European Protestant coalition.
And so we can see exactly why he might choose an alias. He wants to protect himself.
His actions may have been perceived as disloyal to Navarre. He also wants to protect the Protestant alliance,
as information about Navarro's feared conversion could have risked their
relationship with their existing allies or have been leveraged by their enemies.
But of course, aliases were not only used by agents of the state.
But also isn't. Bursaries. Elizabeth.
The first faced repeated plots from Catholics against her position on the throne, both at home and abroad during her reign.
And while these conspiratorial networks have been extensively studied, many aliases to which they've operated remain unresolved or disputed.
And the method provides a kind of systematic way of intervening in these debates.
So I don't want to spend the whole talk kind of showing you piecemeal, like we've sold this alias.
I've sold this alias. Um, but there's a couple of examples here that, um, show what's useful about the method in particular.
Um, it's worth showing again, the method where we find, um, for example, symbols and uh, people just given, uh, initials.
Um, we find among those, uh, likely matches.
So we've got an example of F here is probably, uh, Thomas Fitzherbert, a slightly more tentatively, we think na uh, is should be map to human.
And this is consequential because they were both important leaders within the Catholic exile community in this period.
Um, uh, Fitzherbert was, of course, active in the cause, Mary, Queen of Scots.
And we're going to come back to Hugo in later.
But he was a very kind of important information hub in the, um, funnelling of information between Spain and England, um, in, in the 1590s especially.
And by resolving these aliases, we expand the information we have about these men.
And once again, we're verifying it through handwriting letter form signatures, letter contents.
You know. And in one of them, we've got information about Gilbert Gifford's arrest in Paris.
And we know from contextual information that Fitzherbert was in Paris at that time and would have access to that knowledge.
But I also want to bring up an example of case where we could not find a match because it's an instructive case.
Um, so we have a case of SB, um, and he, um, what would this was in a single letter to address, uh, Charles Paget.
Um, it came with 22 candidates, but it was not possible to decisively match any of these.
The letter is a copy, so we can't rely on handwriting, um, as all the contextual clues are lacking.
But the candidate list itself is 22. Names were revealing because they showed us two important things.
Firstly, it shows us that the f v letter was likely to have been part of an intercepted packet, uh,
because it occurs, uh, two of the other candidate matches W, B and more, um, were sent within the three day window.
So it was likely that part of an intercept packet, um, and also two further candidate matches show more.
And Martin have already by identified in scholarship but not folded back into state papers online as aliases of Thomas Barnes.
So what it's showing us as even without a firm identification,
we're seeing something about the community dynamics around Charles Paget, um, the recipient of this letter.
But in so doing, it also shows us why the second variant of our method may be more useful for thinking about conspirator networks.
Um, so just to remind you of what's different about the second variant, it costs a wider net.
So if you begin with a single person, you can cast the net in their entire community around them.
Um, anybody who they correspond with who may have been an alias.
And that's really good because it doesn't require us to know in advance which names are aliases, because some aliases are not symbols and initials.
Um, as in the case of Sherman and Martin.
Uh, Barness pseudonyms don't announce themselves as aliases.
Um, and it helps us to uncover things like letter bundling and things like that.
Um, which brings us to the case of William Sarah, which we started with that figure, that, um, network diagram, steroids case, uh,
illustrates how profoundly alias attribution can reshape historical interpretation depending on which identities are mapped onto him.
Sterile appears either as a minor and perhaps not very efficient conspirator.
Um, uh, intelligence, uh, or perhaps someone actually working actively with Catholic conspirators.
Um, following, uh, Patrick Martin and John Fiennes's suggestions.
Uh, he was a man managing multiple personas. Um, and on both it provides a systematic way of testing these competing interpretations.
So was he in a ineffectual, uh, in intelligence or was he actually conspiring with the Catholics he was reporting against?
So this started out as part of the Earl of Essex, uh, shadow Foreign Office.
So he, um, in the 1590s, he wanted to set himself up as a successor to Walsingham.
Um, and it was designed, um, as an independent intelligence operation, uh, with Francis Bacon,
um, designed to interpret, uh, shape and redirect information circling amongst Catholic exiles.
And central to this endeavour were Thomas Phillips and William Sterile, whose coordinated use of aliases created such a massive puzzle for us,
uh, working that now the strategy developed was straightforward in conception, uh, but sophisticated in execution.
Sterile would pose as an agent sympathetic to Catholic exiles in Flanders,
feeding them false intelligence reports, um, while reporting back emerging plots against Elizabeth.
So this plan built on, uh, sterilise existing contacts in the Netherlands, particularly amongst figures already suspected, um, of, uh,
involvement in intelligence gathering and conspiracy, including Stanley Holt Sherwood, Edwin Fitzherbert, um, a figure known as Captain Jakes.
So to appreciate the stealth of this operation and the difficulties it poses for modern reconstruction is necessary not to map,
uh, not just a single correspondence network, but multiple overlapping networks associated with the aliases used by sterile, uh,
which, uh, all, uh, listed here, um, with various levels of scholarly backing.
Our method, of course, does not work on this series of, um, three dyads I'm talking about here.
But once we start collapsing the network, this is when the method comes into its own.
So fortunately, the archive itself preserves traces of how their system operated.
And therefore, some of the aliases have already been noticed by the editors of the calendars state papers.
So, for instance, names have been scrubbed and replaced. So this allows us to map the sterile name to, um, Henry.
Some, uh, we have a few endorsements are letters uh, left by Philips, for example,
was a letter sent by uh Franklin, which is endorsed by Philips as to some.
And we also have polygraph evidence which suggests that Harry, which could be confirmed through the ham box in comparison with the Sandman identity.
Um, so this is this is an alias has long been associated with him,
and we can kind of confidently say that these are all the same men operating under the same, uh, under different names.
And what becomes clear by looking at these is that the aces were not randomly divided.
They were relational. For example, uh, the alias Terrell was, uh, the name used for Phillips's internal records.
That's where he's at. That's why he's endorsing, uh, some some men, um, uh, uh, sterile.
Um, his the name that he was given in the XL community, but, uh, comparison was Robinson.
Either that's how he was known or that's how he instructed that community to call him.
Um, and let's us from the Robinson alias. What, uh, was said to not Phillips, but to Morris.
So Phillips there was operating under the Morris, uh, name.
So, in other words, identity was carefully segmented by audience and sometimes even by direction of communication.
Now more complex is the identity of Peter Hollins.
So while traditionally this has been attributed solely to Philips,
Martin and Fitness have argued that Helen's actually functioned as a shared or composite identity used collaboratively both by sterile and Philips.
Um, now there's good evidence that several of Philips did, in fact, uh, operate shared aliases.
So the which of name, for example, which was used by um sterile for outgoing letters in 1602 only was also used as what
we might think of as a kind of inbox or like something like a post office box.
Um, years earlier, the Helen's alias appears to have operated in a similar way,
being used primarily for incoming correspondence in the period 1597 to 1602.
It's never used as an outgoing, um, alias, but unlike which, um Helen's had this kind of fully realised persona.
He was a merchant, a Koopman from London, uh, and different contacts wrote to it, but the two different hands likely managed it.
Although to the outside world it seemed like one single coherent persona.
So from these securely identified aliases, um, we've been able to map Dan Robinson.
Sam which and Franklin and Helen's were single node there.
So we get this consolidated network at the top, and we see already how sterile is a small information hub.
We've also collapsed loops to the aliases of Maurice, William and Talon's.
But we still have these challenges, uh, down the bottom.
Um, uh, also based on the, um, testimony of, uh, Felipe's, um, we have also collapsed on a couple of aliases on Hugh Owen.
Um, we know that he was Pettitt, uh, that he also used the Thomas Nichols and, uh, Nichols aliases.
So this is a this is a partially collapsed network based on material evidence.
However, it's important to note that these verified identities, for the most part, only cover incoming correspondence.
Two Sarah Phillips and Phillips testimony given in 1603, in response to accusations of conspiracy.
But I would note that I wouldn't believe that the correspondence travelling in the opposite direction to come from a friend of sterols.
But under what name are they written?
No letters from Helens are coming, and this is why we come to the more contested, um, uh, the more contested, um, examples.
Martin and Fitness have argued that further aliases such as Fenner Cordell and Vincent Orwell and even Anthony Rivers,
uh, should be attributed to sterile.
And so this matters because, um, rivers actually appears in historical record as someone who is regarded as very crucial to Catholic networks.
And specifically, he's got his own ODB entry.
Sterile does not have an academic entry, so this is consequential.
So if this script, this would radically recast sterile,
not as a marginal or ineffective intelligence, but as a figure deeply embedded in Catholic strategy.
And so this is Martin and Venice's kind of argued big argument.
His empowerment failures may have been calculated to, in fact, serve the exile community.
Now, our purposes engaging with this claim is twofold. First, to test whether the method supports these identifications, a second,
to see whether collapsing these aliases onto a single node enables further discoveries.
Now we can justify a second round of consolidation using two pieces of evidence.
Firstly, our method predicts that Coaldale could in fact be thinner.
And you can see that if you imagine sort of diagonally folding this figure onto the yellow, um, you can see how that that would work.
They could be the same person because they have no contacts. Secondly, the handwriting, I think it's absolutely.
Uh, so these are from the, um, state papers on lies, the horrible quality.
But I think it's very clear that this letter by Fenner is in the same hand as this letter by Coaldale and this letter by reverse.
And I think looking at all of the letters by these guys on the hand and the layout, the format and the way in which they encode the date,
we can definitely say that Fenner, Cordell and Rivers are the same person,
but all of that is that cluster of aliases the same as the sterile cluster of aliases?
If we can match one, then we can prove that they were all the same person.
So the decisive evidence. Oh, I should have said, um.
The really important thing is, is that the handwriting of these letters looks nothing like the sterile aliases.
But that isn't damning evidence in itself, because we can see that sterile wrote in several hands.
We don't see him writing in this hand, but we see him writing in several hands.
He was able to disguise his handwriting. The evidence that cinches it, though, is a little detail, and it might seem like a little detail.
Um, it's about gloves. Um, so in a letter sent to Sterile and Phillips under the Harlan's alias.
Um. Uh. Oh, and sorry, in a letter sent to Cell and Phillips under their Harlan's alias, Owen,
under his Petter alias, requests that some sample gloves be copied and made up into two.
Doesn't pair. So I sent my host in Antwerp. And to whom? I give you charge to deliver my letters to the post.
Two gloves of some resort to be sent unto your unto you, praying you to cause to be made of each fashion a dozen pairs, and that of the like letter.
So later that month we have what looks like a reply, a letter sent under a different alias tenor to, uh, Piccolo and Eddino.
Um, and we think it's a reply because he says, I have spoken your gloves, but they are not yet ready.
Um, that would mean that Fenner potentially is Harlan's and petitioner, or at Lino is Pettit.
Uh, we think the latter. Later that month, again, call Dale another alias.
Again writes to Geibel saying, I wrote to you and Edlin for Brussels like forbid, and I shall expect it.
And by the next opportunity I hope to send Edlin two dozen pair of gloves according to his pattern.
So it's a little detail.
Um, but I think these are the links in the chain that show that Collins is Fenner is cordial, which means that Anthony Rivers is also William Sterile.
Um, as an aside, I don't think these are real gloves.
I think that the gloves are a coded reference, um, probably to, um, manuscript texts for scribal publication.
Um, that seems the most likely temptation and leaving them on, but I think means leaving them unbound.
Um, so once we collapse the sterile identities and rerun the match, that something important happens.
New candidate matches emerge. Um, and now these can be solved iteratively.
And that's what began as a set of isolated puzzles become a dynamic process of reconstruction.
Um, and I don't again, I don't want to go through things in details,
but I think from this work we're able to suggest several new clusters and several new matches.
So, for example, uh, for Hugh Owen, we've already collapsed in with Pettitte and Nichols.
Uh, but we then can suggest additional matches, um, as you know, in the canon, which are almost certain and already suggested in scholarship.
But also we want to suggest a couple more matches that aren't suggested yet, which might be John Leclerc and, uh, Carhart.
We have a alternate proposal for Carhart as well, which might be, uh, Derek, which has already been proposed as an alias of Richard Sherwood.
We also suggest a cluster, um, of aliases.
Uh, Garnett self a guy balls are likely Richard for Stegen.
Um, it doesn't suggest Richard was a match, but he was actually really, really good at keeping his aliases separate.
Um, but Gance, uh, South and Diebold, uh, definitely the same person.
The handwriting is the same. Um, it shows, um, the intermediary role that, uh, the Stegen had in funnelling information to Brussels and to Rome.
We have a third, uh, a further, uh, bundle.
We think that correlates Piccolo and Giuseppe to singer, uh, William Baldwin and Marco, two singer and Akiko, uh, Robert Persons.
And they were two very important leaders in the Catholic exile community.
And finally, we have this figure of Ghazali, who we think is separate from all of his people, but has an intermediary role like the Stegen.
And it could be either Derek Sherwood or Francis Harvey, who was a merchant in the in the Netherlands.
Um. So we've made lots of proposals today.
And taken together, I hope these select examples show how the method is useful for solving aliases and mapping possible theories.
But it's not just solving about solving a set of archival puzzles.
The method also helps to make visible the operational logic of secrecy itself.
Seen from this broader perspective, the proliferation of aliases appears less as a series of ad hoc disguises than as a series of strategies,
and these strategies and trends come into focus gradually through the case studies, but could be summarised as follow.
The agents and conspirators commonly maintain multiple identities that these were tailored to different relationships.
The incoming and outgoing correspondence often was often separated across different pseudonyms,
to make it really difficult to reconstruct handwriting well, sometimes the disguised aliases might be shared or collaboratively maintained.
Um, secure management of intelligence sometimes required individuals to hide additional identities when the collaborators and some aliases function.
Something like a post office box that's attracted to single aliases might in fact be redistributed through intermediaries like the Stegen,
and this infrastructure often invites the bundling of letters into packets.
Uh, and these kind of strategies, you know, strategies like, um,
this if you post office box meant that maybe people who were more peripheral in the network,
maybe not at its centre and might not be entirely trusted, couldn't reconstruct the entire path that communication was taking.
So it was a useful strategy. But more broadly, by showing how our method unfolds in practice.
I have also shown the value of computational heuristics, uh, for this kind of historical research.
Computational methods should never be substitutes, of course, for archival expertise.
And here we show how archival skills and knowledge in the history of the period are absolutely crucial for verifying candidates.
But the number of newly solved aliases and new hypotheses would not have been possible without this method.
Because of the way it renders the search for candidates more tractable.
Its value is not just the way that it may lead us to new matches,
but also the way it allows us to explore and test hypotheses and, um, you know, counterfactual accounts of history.
Um, I'd like to close by pointing out that this method is agnostic.
It wasn't developed, uh, it was developed for the state papers, but would work on any kind of correspondence data set that is not an ego network.
So not there isn't just one person. And that context has to have those kind of, uh, alter connections between them.
Uh, but it's also not just limited to solving aliases.
As I said at the beginning, aliases are what we might think of as an advanced deduplication issue.
So you could use this as a method for data cleaning and to finding finding those, um, those, uh, duplicates entities in your data sets.
But it's also, um, I've got Howard Hudson here. Say it's also been used in the networking archives projects to look at other
community based reasons that people might not be corresponding with one another,
maybe because they were actually avoiding corresponding with one another.
Um, so my main takeaway is that I hope that other people will find this, uh, heuristic useful and pick it up, uh, for their own applications.
So finally, I'd just like to thank again my collaborator, uh, Sebastian, uh,
to our funders, this came out the two Networks of Power project funded by HRC.
And to thank you all for listening. And I look forward to questions. Thank you.