The H-GEAR project

The H-GEAR project is unraveling the intellectual tapestry of America's founders by using digital methods to chart shifts in the character and structure of political discourse during the American Revolution. The project is centered on a large database of time-stamped letters that were exchanged between seven so-called “founding fathers” and other key figures of that time. The ambition of the project is to understand how political discourse changed during the Revolutionary era in the United States, to reveal which people had influence and power, and to discover where and how these changes spread.

1) The first phase of the project involves content-based analysis of the letter correspondences. Specifically, we aim to trace how liberal and republican concepts and ideologies shifted in the period between 1725-1835, uncovering the subtle nuances in language usage that shaped political discourse. Given a small set of user-provided keywords (e.g., freedom, liberty, right), ShiCo software gives insight into changes in the vocabulary used to denote these concepts by examining the semantic relations between words in different years.

2) The second phase employs the combination of semi-supervised topic modeling and temporal social network analysis to establish links between the writers through time. Through the analysis of exchanged letters, the project seeks to identify the most influential figures and map the network that propagated these political ideologies.

Findings underline that Thomas Jefferson emerges as the central figure of this period – not surprising given his leading role in drafting the Declaration of Independence. However, as is common to historical network analyses, because the corpus of letters is biased with its focus on the founding fathers, the researchers acknowledge that the results are equally biased. We nonetheless believe that, given the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, this project contributes to even more attention to the American Revolution.