Our poster and stand at DH2010.

Presenting at the Royal Society.

Cultures of Knowledge headed to London last weekend as the Project Director and Coordinator braved thirty-degree metropolitan temperatures to share the Project’s research at two events. At Digital Humanities 2010, the flagship annual meeting of the digital humanities community hosted this year by King’s College London, we presented a poster, which focused mainly on our union catalogue and its technical underpinnings. We received very useful feedback and discovered and made connections with some highly complementary projects, including the initiative discussed below. Meanwhile, at the kind invitation of our collaborator Mark Greengrass, Howard Hotson co-delivered a keynote address at Circulating Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Networks, Knowledge, and Forms, a conference at the Royal Society organised by Ruth Connolly (University of Newcastle), Felicity Henderson (Royal Society), and Carol Pal (Bennington College). Building on Mark’s overview of Hartlib’s significance as an intelligencer and the trials and tribulations of the Hartlib Papers Project, Howard used a description of the place of Hartlib and his letters within Cultures of Knowledge as the basis for a more general overview of the Project and its aspirations, especially within the digital sphere.

Download the poster presented at DH2010

The challenge of describing, storing, and linking biographical and prosopographical information about historical actors and communities within a network environment is one faced by all digital correspondence projects. Fortunately, a workshop on Persons – Data – Repositories designed to explore these questions in detail will take place at the Berlin-Brandenbury Academy of Sciences on 27-29 September 2010. Organised under the auspices of the DFG project Person Data Repository, the event will discuss the development of tools and processes for handling person data which will enable both the automated merging of information while preserving a diversity of methods, an approach which requires both ‘cooperative and decentralized concepts’ and ‘new perspectives on data usage’ (connected in intricate ways to legal questions). For further information, including registration details, please see the workshop webpage.