Visualizing Linearity: Religion, Gender, and Progress in an Eighteenth-Century Quaker Archive.

This article examines the Ballitore Collection, an archive of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish Quaker materials held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, through a collaborative project involving faculty and students from UCSB, California State University, Northridge, and Howard University. Employing computational methods such as topic modeling and network analysis alongside traditional archival research, the project challenges linear narratives of Enlightenment progress, secularization, and gender roles within Quakerism. Findings reveal the persistence and complexity of religious discourse amid emerging secular concerns, nuanced gender relations with significant cross-gender correspondence and female influence in social networks, and ambivalent political stances that resist simple categorizations of Quakers as either progressive or conservative. The study highlights how digital humanities tools can uncover multifaceted historical perspectives in a medium-sized manuscript corpus, emphasizing non-linear, networked understandings of history and community.