Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the digital age: standards, systems, scholarship

Abstract

"Between 1500 and 1800, the rapid evolution of postal communication allowed ordinary men and women to scatter letters across Europe like never before. This exchange helped knit together what contemporaries called the 'respublica litteraria', a knowledge-based civil society, crucial to that era's intellectual breakthroughs, formative of many modern values and institutions, and a potential cornerstone of a transnational level of European identity. Ironically, the exchange of letters which created this community also dispersed the documentation required to study it, posing enormous difficulties for historians of the subject ever since. To reassemble that scattered material and chart the history of that imagined community, we need a revolution in digital communications. Between 2014 and 2018, an EU networking grant assembled an interdisciplinary community of over 200 experts from 33 different countries and many different fields for four years of structured discussion. The aim was to envisage transnational digital infrastructure for facilitating the radically multilateral collaboration needed to reassemble this scattered documentation and to support a new generation of scholarly work and public dissemination. The framework emerging from those discussions - potentially applicable also to other forms of intellectual, cultural and economic exchange in other periods and regions - is documented in this book."--Back cover.

Contents

I. Reassembling the Republic of Letters. Introduction / Howard Hotson and Thomas Wallnig -- What Was the Republic of Letters? / Dirk van Miert, Howard Hotson, and Thomas Wallnig -- How Do We Model the Republic of Letters? / Christoph Kudella ; with contributions from Neil Jefferies -- II. Standards: Dimensions of Data. Letters / Elizabethanne Boran [and others] -- Place / Arno Bosse -- Time / Miranda Lewis [and four others] -- People / Howard Hotson [and four others] -- Topics / Howard Hotson and Eero Hyvönen -- Events / Neil Jefferies with Gertjan Filarski and Thomas Stäcker -- Letter Model / Neil Jefferies [and six others] -- III. Systems, Methods, and Tools. Assembling metadata / Dirk van Miert and Elizabethanne Boran [with contributions from others] -- Reconciling Metadata / Eero Hyvönen [and six others] -- Transcribing and Editing Text / Charles van den Heuvel [and six others] -- Modelling Texts and Topics / Charles van den Heuvel -- Exchanging Metadata / Arno Bosse [and four others] -- IV. Scholarship in a Digital Environment. Beyond Visualization / Paolo Ciuccarelli and Tommaso Elli -- Geographies of the Republic of Letters / Ian Gregory [and eight others] -- Chronologies of the Republic of Letters / Howard Hotson [and nine others] -- Prosopographies of the Republic of Letters / Howard Hotson [and four others] -- Networking the Republic of Letters / Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert [with contributions from others] -- Text-mining the Republic of Letters / Charles van den Heuvel [and twelve others] -- Virtual Research Environments for the Digital Republic of Letters / Meliha Handzic and Charles van den Heuvel -- V. Epilogue. Synopsis and Prospects / Howard Hotson.