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Hold the Front Page! CofK on DH@O

dh_oxford_front_pageWe were this week’s featured project on Digital.Humanities@Oxford, meaning a coveted front-page slot for a brief description of Cultures of Knowledge and the logo for our union catalogue, Early Modern Letters Online. Recently given a facelift and some important new functionality, DH@O is a central hub for information about relevant activities, resources, and activities in Oxford – one of the most established centres of digital humanities in the world – and features a growing relational database of people and projects involved.

Early Modern Letters Online Beta Launch Event

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EMLO screenshots captivate the crowd.

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Chris Fletcher sets the scene.

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Festive designers and programmers.

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The Lister and Lhwyd research teams.

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Stephen Clucas and Philip Beeley.

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Will Poole and Richard Sharpe.

After a very busy year in private alpha, the Project celebrated the imminent public beta launch of our free union catalogue – Early Modern Letters Online − with a festive reception last Friday. Over eighty students, scholars, librarians, and digital humanists joined us in the historic environment of the Bodleian Library‘s Divinity School, where – over mulled wine, seasonal canapés, and mince pies – they were treated to contextual remarks from Dr Chris Fletcher (Keeper of Special Collections) and Professor Howard Hotson (Director of Cofk), and a full demonstration of the capabilities of the catalogue’s search and discovery, and editorial, interfaces by Project Coordinator Dr James Brown. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the success of the evening, with a special shout-out to the Bodleian’s Wilma Minty for arranging things with her usual flair.

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The EMLO homepage.

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EMLO Edit, the editorial interface.

Early Modern Letters Online – which currently contains 60,480 epistolary records – federates basic metadata from eight contributing sources (including 48,695 sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century records drawn from the existing card index of correspondence in the Bodleian Library), and allows for their manipulation and further enhancement by means of a sophisticated editorial environment. It will be available to the public from early January 2012.

hollyemlo_logo_infrastructureTo stay informed, please watch this space or join the Mailing List. In the meantime, we wish you all a very Happy Holidays!

Surf Report: CofK Featured in Times Higher Education

the_spreadCultures of Knowledge was featured in a THE survey of digital humanities projects last week. CofK was interviewed alongside staff from the Digital Miscellanies Index, the Old Bailey Online, Linguistic Geographies: The Gough Map of Great Britain, DigiPal, Ancient Lives, the Online Chopin Varorium Edition, and the DIAMM. Here’s how the article described the Project:

‘A remarkable project titled Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters seeks to reconstruct pan-European intellectual networks by creating a modern equivalent. Many leading thinkers of the time were forced by war to flee from their homes and so left their papers all over the Continent. The digital revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, says Howard Hotson, professor of early modern intellectual history at the University of Oxford, have enabled a team based in Oxford (with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) to build ‘radically multinational forms of international collaboration of a kind which was effectively impossible before’, so as to reassemble in virtual form long-scattered learned correspondences. The project should transform the study of topics such as the Scientific Revolution…’

The article – mischievously entitled ‘Surfdom’ – goes on to raise some important caveats about electronic forms of humanistic research, even though for most digital projects these will serve as reminders of pitfalls and best practice rather than highlights of new or emerging issues. The emphasis on the necessity of crafting digital tools both in the service of research questions and alongside more conventional modes of scholarship is very much up our street as a full-spectrum academic enterprise, while some of the author’s concerns regarding the accessibility, sustainability, and especially accountability of large-scale online resources are also well-taken. Here’s the article; there’s a lively debate in the comments section and on Twitter.

CofK Participates in Hevelius Conference in Gdańsk

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Philip consults the Cometographia.

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Kim introduces the union catalogue.

CofK Research Fellow, Philip Beeley, and Editor, Kim McLean-Fiander, have recently returned from Poland after participating in a conference on Johannes Hevelius: The Burgher of Gdańsk and his Work. Hosted by the Gdańsk Scientific Society on 24-25 November, and taking place in the splendid historic setting of the Main Town Hall, the conference was organised to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the birth of one of the city’s most famous sons, the astronomer, instrument maker, inventor, brewer, printing-house owner, and town councillor, Johannes Hevelius (1611-87).

The conference opened with a special viewing of some of the Hevelian treasures of the Polish Academy of Sciences Library, including the Cometographia. His life and works were then examined from a wide range of perspectives by speakers from Poland, France, Italy, and the UK on topics such as the correlations between Hevelius’s astronomical observations in Gdańsk and those taken by Jean Picard on the same day in Paris; the controversy which arose between Hevelius and Adrien Auzout over systems for tracking comet paths; Hevelius’s work as an inventor of scientific instruments and the pendulum clock; his curriculum whilst attending the Gdańsk Academic Gymnasium; and his vocational experiences as city councillor, brewer, and printing-house owner. After a private viewing of the Main Town Hall’s excellent exhibition Johannes Hevelius and Gdańsk of his Times, Philip opened Friday afternoon’s session with a paper on ‘Hevelius, Hartlib, and Wallis: Early Modern Ideals of Scientific Collaboration’, which argued that this tripartite correspondence between Oxford, London, and Danzig exemplified, as no other, the ideals of the Republic of Letters: intellectual collaboration and exchange as a means to promote the growth of knowledge. Drawing on examples from these and other correspondents within Hevelius’s circle, Kim then demonstrated our forthcoming digital union catalogue of intellectual correspondence, revealing how it allows researchers not only to locate often elusive and dispersed early modern letters, but also to interrogate them in new and exciting ways.

Kim and Philip would like to thank their Polish hosts, in particular Professor Marian Turek and his wife Liz, for their warm hospitality and the invitation to attend the conference in this beautiful Pomeranian city.

Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies

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James introduces the Project.

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Anna Marie describes stibnite.

The Project was on the road again this week, this time at the venerable Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies, which this year took as its theme ‘Communication and Exchange’ (University of Reading, 18−20 July 2011). On Monday afternoon, a panel devoted to CofK comprised three interlocking papers. Project Coordinator James Brown provided an overview of the Project and its intellectual objectives, Research Fellow Anna Marie Roos delivered a wonderful case study of Martin Lister‘s hitherto unsung contributions to Newtonian telescopy, while Editor Kim McLean Fiander introduced our union catalogue of early modern correspondence and treated delegates to a sneak preview of its editorial and search interfaces. In the evening, Project Director Howard Hotson concluded our contribution with a plenary address on the multi-layered network of Samuel Hartlib. In a wide-ranging analysis, Howard recapitulated some of the broader objectives of the Project, before describing the way in which Hartlib’s legendary intelligencing both superimposed and reflected the pedagogical, diplomatic, commercial, and military networks engendered by the upheavals of the Thirty Years War. For more information about the conference, please download the programme (pdf).

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Kim introduces the catalogue.

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Howard's keynote on Hartlib.

New Visualizations for the Union Catalogue

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The CofK network at-a-glance.

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New interactive bar charts.

Further to our report on Scott Weingart‘s visit and presentation on Visualizing and Navigating the Republic of Letters, here’s a quick update on some of the fruits of his labours. During the week he was with us, Scott worked intensively with our developer community at BDLSS to implement some visual respresentations of the metadata assembled in our union catalogue of early modern correspondences, and the team produced some lovely deliverables within record time. The first are some revealing social network visualizations of the relationships between the 11,284 correspondents currently on the system, created with the Gephi graphics package. The second are some interactive, in-browser bar charts for display on person profile pages, displaying at-a-glance the number of letters sent, received, and mentioned in, created with the d3.js javascript library… and there’s more to come. At-a-glance representations such as these will radically improve the legibility and navigability of our records for end users, so a thank you to Scott for sharing his expertise with us. A public beta of the union catalogue will be available in the autumn.

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