Connections

Recipients and Works

The below visualization shows relationships between Cather's recipients and the works 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 and works displayed in the network, I selected the people Cather wrote to most frequently (top 20 most frequent) and among those, selected the recipients who she wrote to about her works most frequently (top 10 relatively most frequent). I did this to ensure that there were many meaningful connections on the graph. For example, if I had simply selected the recipients who Cather wrote to relatively most frequently about her own work, I would have ended up with recipients who Cather perhaps wrote to two or three times. All of these letters would have contained references to Cather's work (e.g. 100% of the letters to that recipient contain a reference) but there would not be many letters to pull from. Conversely, just looking at the people she wrote to most frequently would not have ensured a rich and comparable number of references to her own work.

Recipients are represented as green nodes. The gray nodes represent the works Cather writes to these people about (the top 10 works for each person). So, for example, we can see that Cather frequently writes to both Zoë Akins and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant about "The Bohemian Girl." 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 brother Roscoe Cather about "The Bohemian Girl," but it is not one of his "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.