Connections

Recipients and People

The below visualization shows relationships between Cather's recipients and the people Cather wrote to them about. The graph is interactive: you can zoom in or out and move/reposition the nodes within the graph.

To determine the people displayed in the network, I selected the recipients who Cather wrote to about the broadest and most varied group of people. In other words, recipients who were engaged in Cather's written social networks. For example, Cather wrote to her brother Roscoe Cather about 272 unique people, putting him at the top of this list. For each of these recipients, I then collected the top ten people who Cather wrote to that recipient about.

Recipients are represented as green nodes. The gray nodes represent the people Cather writes to these recipients about (the top 10 people for each recipient). So, for example, we can see that Cather frequently writes to both Zoë Akins and Carrie Miner Sherwood about Yehudi Menuhin. The thickness of each line represents the frequency of the connection. The graph is not exhaustive: e.g. Cather may very well write to her mother Mary Virginia Boak Cather about Yehudi Menuhin, but he is not one of her "top" connections. The graph is intended to help spark discussion and provide another way for users to navigate and explore Cather's correspondence. You might consider using this graph alongside Cather's letters or the information presented on The Willa Cather Archive.