This poster presents an exploratory digital tool for analyzing and visualizing the nineteenth-century correspondence of the Bulgarian merchant brothers Evlogi and Hristo Georgievi, whose economic, cultural, and philanthropic activities shaped Southeast European society and contributed to the founding of Sofia University. The project provides an integrated environment for exploring over 800 TEI-encoded archival entries, enabling researchers to engage with a dispersed historical corpus through spatial visualization, statistical analysis, and network modeling. In doing so, it demonstrates how digital humanities methods foster connections between communities, places, and archival memory, aligning with the conference theme of “Engagement.”

The Georgievi letters constitute a multilingual, transregional communication network linking Ottoman Bulgarian towns with the Danubian Principalities, Central Europe, and the Mediterranean. Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, and French circulated together, reflecting the linguistic diversity of nineteenth-century commerce. Rather than relying on automated translation, the project emphasizes human-encoded TEI metadata and philological attention to names, places, and commodities. Translation, across languages, scripts, and archival formats, is treated as a collaborative scholarly act. The tool enables users to navigate these multilingual traces and engage with historical communication practices shaped by adaptation and negotiation.

At its core, the project commits to annotation within a small-data framework. The dataset is modest due to the limits of surviving sources, but it offers interpretive depth rather than large-scale abstraction. Each letter was encoded in TEI XML to capture correspondents, dates, and geographic references, with standardized place names linked to a gazetteer. This approach foregrounds data as a historical artifact rather than a neutral substrate. By prioritizing curated, human-driven annotations, particularly for under-resourced languages, the project supports nuanced analysis while avoiding algorithmic opacity and encouraging reflection on data creation, interpretation, and archival bias.

The Streamlit-based interface integrates three analytical lenses. A map module built with Leaflet and Folium visualizes the network’s geographic reach, highlighting its Lower Danube core and connections to cities such as Istanbul, Odessa, Trieste, Manchester, and London. Filters allow users to trace changes by correspondent, commodity, or time. A statistical view reveals broader patterns, most notably Hristo Georgiev’s role as the correspondence hub, while linking each visualization back to the underlying TEI records and individual letters.

The network analysis module, developed with NetworkX, models correspondence as a directed, weighted graph. Node size reflects degree, and edge thickness indicates frequency. The resulting hub-and-spoke structure centers on Hristo Georgiev, with clusters and peripheral modules representing parallel ventures. This interactive model enables researchers to test hypotheses about commercial coordination, kinship, and political or economic organization in ways that complement traditional historiography.

The Georgievi correspondence forms part of a cultural memory spanning multiple states and languages. Encoding it in TEI XML and publishing it through transparent, FAIR workflows transforms archival documents into reusable, interpretable data. The tool amplifies rather than replaces archival memory, enabling letters once locked in copybooks to be explored by scholars, students, and the wider public. The project demonstrates how responsible digital methods can deepen engagement with historical archives and generate new perspectives on networks, language, and cultural memory.