UCF historians are working to make historical migration records more accessible by combining traditional research with modern technology. Rosalind Beiler, associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida (UCF), leads the People, Religion, Information Networks and Travel (PRINT) project. The initiative focuses on tracing communication and migration networks of lesser-known 17th and 18th-century European religious groups, such as Anabaptists, Quakers, and Pietists.
Beiler collaborates with colleagues from UCF’s Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR), including associate director Amy Larner Giroux and applications developer Brook Miller, as well as UCF librarians, students, and approximately 1,800 citizen scholar volunteers. Together, they aim to build a publicly accessible archive that visualizes the movements and connections of letter writers from that era.
“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.
The project involves international cooperation with archives in Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Sometimes, the team scans letters and creates metadata themselves.
“The people in these letters are mostly ordinary people, and they’re going through things just like we are today,” Beiler 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.”
Beiler began developing PRINT in 2016 after noticing complex patterns among correspondents and religious groups in historical letters. The project has entered its third year of funding from 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.”
The technical team at CHDR, led by Miller, is responsible for integrating the transcribed letters with network analysis and mapping tools. “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,” Miller says.
The team is developing a database with open data links for all hosted letters and an automated metadata pipeline for future contributions. Miller notes that advances in digitization and database management now allow for deeper analysis of historical networks. “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.
Graduate student Kailey Freeman-DePelisi and history master’s alum Adaeze Nwigwe are among those working on digital archiving for PRINT. Freeman-DePelisi has been focusing on Dutch Anabaptist letters from Amsterdam since spring 2024. “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.”
Nwigwe discovered unexpected legal disputes involving Quaker community members during her research. “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.”
She notes that working with PRINT has improved her research skills: “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 estimates that it will take about two more years before the PRINT database is fully user-friendly. She encourages interested individuals to learn more or volunteer by visiting printmigrationnetwork.org.
Beiler’s background includes research on migration within early modern Europe and British colonies, as well as fellowships at Harvard University, Free University Berlin, and other institutions.
