Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

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.

Contributions are sought for the launch conference of the recently established UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges, which will take place at UCL on 15–17 September 2011. Proposals for individual panels or papers should address aspects of intercultural exchanges 1450–1800, and ‘contributors are encouraged to focus on Centre’s themes: travel, exile and migration in early modern Europe and the New World; trade and flows of material as well as cultural goods within and beyond Europe; translation, translators and language learning; literary influence across national, provincial and linguistic borders; representations of intra- and extra-European ‘others’ in literature and art; religious and political interactions in the wake of the Reformation; occasions of significant cultural contact and/or heightened national anxiety; the production, circulation, and collection of books and manuscripts across Europe, the emergence of libraries and the book trade; dissemination and development of scientific and medical knowledge; Old worlds and New worlds, colonialism and ethnography; interplay between past and present, historiography, classical and medieval pasts, archaeology and material cultures’. The deadline for proposals is 17 January 2011; for full details, please see the conference webpage.

The Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at QMUL will be hosting a workshop on Thursday 17 September on ‘Digitizing Correspondence’. The event, which is sponsored by JISC, will allow archivists, editors, and researchers to converge on a range of issues relating to the digitization of letter collections in a context of presentations, round table discussions, and breakout groups. For a draft programme and booking information, please see the workshop webpage.