Net-work: Irish Sea Crossings with and beyond Infrastructure

This article explores the co-constitution of networks and infrastructure in the context of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture. We consider Maria Edgeworth’s conceptualization of the term network with and alongside infrastructure in her Harry and Lucy stories (1801–25) and offer an analysis of a manuscript tour by Mary Anne Eade from 1802. Eade’s tour has been annotated and marked up in the Recogito semantic annotation framework using eXtensible Markup Language (XML) files created by the AHRC-funded Curious Travellers project. The article offers a discussion of the reuse, enhancement, and open sharing of annotated source material and makes the case for using mature tools such as Recogito in order to shape new questions about the experience of travel during a period of technological change. We suggest that an expanded understanding of the co-dependence of network and infrastructure has implications for the allocation of time and resources within the digital humanities research and practice of scholars seeking to visualize and analyse nineteenth-century tours and letters.