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

A beta version of the correspondence of the sixteenth-century naturalist Carolus Clusius (1526-1609), developed by the Huygens ING (KNAW) and the Scaliger Institute (Leiden University Libraries), is now available online. Created with eLaborate, the online transcription platform developed by Huygens ING, the site currently features fully searchable transcriptions of 450 letters, but metadata on all known letters together with scans of 1,300 letters in the Leiden University Library are also included. Scholars in the field of the history of science, students of languages and paleography, and anyone seriously interested in the history of botany are invited to participate in the ongoing refinement of the resource, contributing new transcriptions, or improving existing texts. For further information and a link to the beta, please visit the Project webpage.

On Thursday 3 May Florike Egmond from the Clusius Project will be sharing a paper on Clusius, collecting, and practices of scientific illustration in our third annual seminar series. For her talk and seven other exciting contributions, please visit the seminar webpage.

Videos of twenty-one papers and keynotes from our 2011 conference Intellectual Geography: Comparative Studies, 1550-1700 (Oxford, 5-7 September 2011) are now available on the conference website or via our Vimeo channel (with more hopefully to come). Organised by Howard Hotson, the event introduced and tested the novel concept of ‘intellectual geography’ as a means of appreciating and understanding the organisation of intellectual activity and the dissemination of ideas within space and across time, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. A taster – Miles Ogborn‘s keynote exploration of ‘What is Intellectual Geography?’ – is provided below. Happy viewing!

We 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.

Detail from the graphic.

Melissa Terras from the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities has, with the support of the UCLCDH, created a wonderful infographic of this exciting field. While not completely comprehensive, the visualization combines data from a wide variety of online sources across a range of measurable criteria, and is definitely worth a look. The infographic is available via the UCLCDH Flickr Stream or as a print download (pdf).

EMLO screenshots captivate the crowd.

Chris Fletcher sets the scene.

Festive designers and programmers.

The Lister and Lhwyd research teams.

Stephen Clucas and Philip Beeley.

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.

The EMLO homepage.

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.

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

Cultures 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.