Project Circulation of Knowledge and learned practices in the 17th-century Dutch Republic. A web-based Humanities Collaboratory on Correspondences (Geleerdenbrieven) - archived version d.d. 2013-07-23

In short: how did knowledge circulate? The 17th-century Republic offers an ideal case for exploring the answers to this question, and correspondence between scholars is the ideal research subject. That is because until the publication of the first scientific journals in the 1660s, letters were by far the most direct and important means of communication between intellectuals.

In order to answer the research question, a huge amount of such correspondence needs to be analyzed systematically. Traditional research methods are inadequate, and for that reason a consortium of universities, research institutes and cultural heritage institutions built a multidisciplinary collaboratory to analyze a machine-readable and growing corpus starting with, but not limited to, the approximately 20,000 letters of scholars who lived in the Dutch United Provinces during the 17th century.

The consortium is in the process of building the web-based tools to analyze and visualize the 17th-century epistolary networks and their themes of interest, and to enrich this corpus with annotations. The collaboratory will not only contribute to our understanding of the circulation of knowledge in the 17th century, but also generate useful technologies for cross-disciplinary collaborations involving data-sharing and data enrichment in the Humanities.

As such, this web-based Humanities collaboratory on correspondences is a valuable prototype for possible future research collaborations focusing on large, heterogeneous datasets.