The purpose of this paper is to address the role of knowledge management (KM) in the humanities. With rapidly increasing quantities of digital humanities data, there is a growing need for new KM methods for analysing and presenting big data. At the same time, humanities have to tackle the task of interpreting KM interventions on such data and their value for answering humanities research questions. Responding to the above challenges, this study was carried out to examine whether and how valuable visualisation of historic diplomatic letters was for interpreting and understanding the political context in which they were sent. The research was carried out via focus group methodology. Firstly, 16 study participants completed individual visualisation exercises using several digital tools. These exercises involved identifying and recording the date, origin and destination places of 120 diplomatic letters known as “borderers’ letters”, transforming these data into larger categories (countries, centuries), and presenting such classified digital data visually in the form of tables, graphs and maps. Secondly, the participants were divided into 2 focus groups where they discussed what they had learnt from their visualisation experience. Group notes were taken and analysed for content. The study made two valuable contributions. Firstly, it opened up a new line of research that should benefit both KM and the humanities. More generally, it suggested that the increased scale of digital artefacts might offer new exciting possibilities and challenges for future scholarship in KM and different arts and sciences. Secondly, the study provided some positive preliminary evidence of the value of KM for the humanistic research and training. Specifically, in the case of diplomatic correspondence, the study showed how visualisation of the frequency, geography and timing of diplomatic letters could serve as a barometer of international relations. This study implied that visualisation might change the nature of interaction and sharing of insights among historians and other humanities scholars. In particular, the study suggested that spatial and temporal maps could tell a good story. However, these implications need to be interpreted with caution due to a number of limiting factors. Among these are: specific set of diplomatic letters, small sample size, and subjective choice of visualisation software. Future research is recommended to address these limitations and extend current research to other KM initiatives and their applications in other scholarly disciplines.