During my research stay at Oxford I made an inventory of the 647 items from the correspondence of Isaac Vossius in the Bodleian Library. This research was part of a larger project involving research in the University Libraries of Leiden and Amsterdam, which keep the two largest collections of Vossius’ letters. These collections have autographs and manuscript copies, so there was bound to be overlap, but no one had ever compared the collections. The project aimed at bringing together in a single database all the metadata over the disparate complete correspondence of Vossius, identifying all the individual letters and listing per letter the shelf marks of autographs and apographs, and adding references to published versions. I have entered the basic metadata (date, sender, recipient, their locations, manifestations, incipit, language and related resources) of each individual letter into Oxford’s open access union catalogue of learned correspondence, Early Modern Letters Online (http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk). Although the Bodleian card catalogue, including 614 items from Vossius’ correspondence, had already been digitized and ingested into EMLO, these records could not be used to compare the three collections since the Bodleian catalogue cards and consequently the records in EMLO all lack incipits and one fourth of the letters are not dated. By far the largest part of the collection in the Bodleian Library, containing 558 letters, proved to be copies of autographs in the Amsterdam University Library. A large part of the collection in the Leiden University Library consists of copies from these same autographs. This means that there is indeed a large overlap between the Oxford collection and the Amsterdam and Leiden collections. I further made use of the extensive collection of library catalogues in the Bodleian Library to track down items from Vossius’ correspondence in other repositories. This resulted in the discovery of another 150-175 letters. My inventory of Vossius’ correspondence now consists of an estimated total of 1800 letters, transmitted in autograph and/or (more than one) manuscript copy and/or printed version. They will be published with a short introduction in EMLO towards the end of 2015. During my stay in Oxford I also provided hands-on assistance during the COST-funded conference, Working Group meetings and training school there on 22-25 March.

The aim of The Bartolomeo Project is twofold. First, it seeks to facilitate knowledge exchange between COST partners, the Cultures of Knowledge Project, Oxford (CofK); the Austrian National Library (ONB); the Medical University of Vienna (MUW); the Bassano City Museum, the History of Medicine Unit, Padua University. Secondly, the Bartolomeo Gamba Project aims to provide a case study in intellectual history of Padua University alumni in the Republic of Letters, 1550-1800. This will entail the first scholarly analysis of the Bartolomeo Gamba collection of correspondence of eminent Italians, which is partly kept in the library of the Bassano City Museum and partly in the Austrian National Library in Vienna, Austria. As will be explained below, the Gamba collection has a strong focus on Padua University alumni, most of whom had ties to the Vienna Medical Faculty. It is made up of a total of 1350 letters. In order to work on the entirety of the Gamba collection, its digitisation will be the preliminary step that will equip me with the relevant primary sources. Through a cooperation agreement between the Cultures of Knowledge Project at the University of Oxford, the Medical University of Vienna, the Austrian National Library, and the Bassano City Museum, the History of Medicine Unit, Padua University, the digitisation of both branches of the Gamba collection will start as of 1 October 2014. As a Digital Fellow I will be in charge of inputting the metadata of the Gamba letters into Early Modern Letters Online, a new Oxford Bodleian Library free online catalogue which is set to becoming the primary research tool for intellectual historians working on the Republic of Letters, http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. While inputting the metadata, I will carry out the scientific analysis of the Gamba collection, for which I have a one-year research contract with the Medical University of Vienna. Travelling between Rome, where I am based this year as Visiting Fellow at the University of California, Rome Center, to Padua and Bassano, and to Vienna, will be crucial to the co-operation agreements between COST partners CofK, MUW, ONB, Bassano City Museum, the History of Medicine Unit, Padua University. It will also help me fulfill my research goals.

The main goal of this STSM was to find letters from/to French musicians active in Verona during the Renaissance period and archival documents concerning their professional life, in order to gather information and data for an existing prosopographical database about musicians’ careers – Prosopographie des chantres de la Renaissance – directed by David Fiala and Philippe Vendrix at the CESR in Tours. The town of Verona has been evidently chosen because of its historical and geographical importance during the Renaissance.

As a result of my new in situ research, two other institutions have been added to the initially previewed list of institutions of where to search for archival documents and letters (the Archivio di Stato, the Archivio Storico della Curia and the Biblioteca Capitolare) : the Accademia Filarmonica and the Biblioteca civica (hosting a section of the municipal archives). Here I have also found several useful bibliographical contributions by local scholars.

The final outcomes of my research can be shortly recapitulated as follows:

• a list of more than 300 items of musicians active in Verona between 1480 and 1600, all including detailed and documented information (with archival references) about their professional life;
• a structured Excel database of almost 50 letters of musicians, providing diplomatic transcriptions, material analysis (dimensions, seals, watermarks, countermarks, etc.), and bibliographical references (if any).

Concerning the prosopographical part of this STSM, the newly collected data about musicians’ careers have permitted me to correct or to complete some aspects of the existing musicological literature. Among the transcribed letters, some stand out for their importance. Of particular interest is the group of 10 letters by the Franco-Flemish composer Jan Nasco (of which only 7 have been partially published, as excerpts in essays by local scholars), or 2 letters containing the name of the French composer Lambert Courtois. Several until now unknown letters were found, in particular 2 letters dealing with the Italian composer Orazio Vecchi, and some unpublished letters by members of the Accademia Filarmonica housed in the Archivio di Stato.

The primary purpose of this short term scientific mission is to share information, as well as to evaluate how tools developed at Aalto could benefit the Early Modern Letters Online database managed at Oxford. The mission will allow the partners to better explore which avenues appear most fruitful for further collaboration related to the aims of the COST Action, in preparation of more substantial collaborative applications to come at a later date. Concretely, at Aalto University there has been much research by the applicant as well as others into modeling and publishing complex cultural heritage collections as Linked Open Data. Aalto and the applicant have also undertaken considerable research into how such collections can be integrated to provide a unified view to diverse collections.

Post Praeceptorem Germaniae: Scholarly Networks and Transfer of Melanchthon´s Natural Philosophy in Central Europe from the 1540s onwards. The main goal of the STMS was to develop the postdoctoral project which investigates the correspondence networks between collaborators of Philipp Melanchthon and the Central European scholars, who were directly influenced by his educational model, and reconstructs the ways in which particular knowledge, here Melanchthon´s natural philosophy, was transmitted and transformed within the framework of this cultural exchange. The topic of “confessionalized” scholarly networks is regarded as one of the ways how to reconsider the place of the Republic of Letters in a broader cultural history of Europe in the 16th and early 17th centuries. During the STSM I discussed the digital infrastructures and techniques necessary to analyse and visualize my data with members of the research team of the Cultures of Knowledge in Oxford; I also researched extensively in Oxford libraries concerning (i) Melanchthon´s natural philosophy and its transformations and (ii) the latest applications of social network analysis on early modern scholarly communication. I further worked on the first phase of the annotated bibliography which will collect the secondary literature on early modern scholarly networking and will be built collaboratively in the future. In this respect, the STSM wants to contribute to discussions about Action's Historiographical Agenda and find its use while preparing the for the Action's Warsaw Conference in June 2016.

My research has widely used private documents from archives and I have been studying women’s correspondence. Since I finished my PhD, in the last few months I have been studying the letters written by the Marchioness of Alorna (1750-1839) and by other members of the families Alorna and Fronteira who wrote before 1800. It is a very significant corpus, because they kept intellectual and political contacts throughout Europe. There are over twenty thousand documents, stored in the National Archives, at the Fronteira collection. The corpus is of the utmost importance in European terms, not only because of the people involved, but especially because of their connections, the reach of their contacts and the contents of the letters. Nonetheless, in order to make an adequate analysis of this corpus and to make it part of the COST Action I feel the need to become familiar with new expertise which may help me deal with this material. By applying to this STSM with the BIESES team, I hope to understand and to define possible relevant concepts to describe and categorize women’s role in the cultural system, a question closely related to their letters and essential for an accurate description of the material. On the digital side, I expect to gain experience in developing ontologies to recover abstract information and the different ways in which this information can be displayed and used. Applying the acquired expertise to describe and categorize my case study will offer a proof of concept for the women’s letters COST Action.

The proposed STSM involves a visit to the DensityDesign Lab at the Politecnico di Milan for two periods of two weeks in early 2016 by a researcher into innovative forms of historical narrative from the University of East Anglia. The purpose of the visit is to explore through a collaborative design process how humanistic scholarly enquiry can be represented to a wider public using interactive visualization techniques (the focus of Working Group 6 of the Action). The agenda for the research will be how the fine grain of the life stories of figures in the Republic who are geographically marginal or outliers to the correspondence networks can be explored, their texture and temporalities revealed, and their relationship to the macrocosm made legible. The mission will result in a draft design for a multi-faceted interface for the exploration of the intellectual life course and social career of a member of the Republic of Letters.

Mackenzie Cooley (PhD candidate, Stanford University) will travel to Spain in February 2016 to contribute to COST ACTION IS1310’s Working Group 2: “People and Networks” and develop her project, “Mapping the Relaciones Geográficas of Philip II’s New Spain.” Cooley has been invited to Cádiz (1-14 February) to collaborate with Antonio Dávila’s “Elio Antonio de Nebrija” group and the “Correspondence of Benito Arias Montano” project. Cooley will then relocate to Madrid (14-28 February) to collaborate with PI Nieves Baranda and other members of “Bibliography of Spanish Women Writers” (BIESES), including TEI-XML expert María Dolores Martos and TEscribe developer Álvaro Piquero. Cooley will contribute to “WG2, II.2-4” by testing the a) integration of “event streams” into digital models, b) specification of events typical in the life of an early modern intellectual in a transatlantic context, and c) reconstruction of social networks underlying correspondence networks. Her project will highlight commonalities and distinctions between event streams (WG2, II.3) suitable for European and transatlantic intellectuals. With knowledge acquired in Madrid and Cádiz, she will evaluate the suitability of existing tools (esp. Palladio) to depict data and enrich her research through use of ePistolarium and/or EMLO (WG2,V.1,3). In sum, through the STSM Cooley will deliver: 1) A presentation of research questions to hosts, sharing insights from working with Stanford University’s CESTA and Mapping the Republic of Letters (MRofL) 2) A short discussion paper on “Prospographical Event Streams and Open Linked Data for Sixteenth Century Spanish Empire, exemplified by the Relaciones Geográficas del siglo XVI” 3) A digital history workshop at Italian home institution 4) A remote digital workshop with Stanford University CESTA 5) A scientific report to host institution, including reviews of TEI-XML and TEscribe techniques 6) A Briefing Paper for Working Group 2: “People and Networks” in collaboration with Oxford scholars working on event stream modeling and present outcomes at upcoming COST events.

The purpose of this STSM is to examine the manuscript papers of the English Churches in the Netherlands, using certain key ministers as pilot case studies to begin to gather together a catalogue or census of the correspondence of the English churches abroad and stranger churches in England. The correspondence archives of five English ministers in Holland have been selected: Hugh Goodyear (Leiden), John Paget (Amsterdam), William Ames (Leeuwarden), Samuel Bamford (The Hague), and Hugh Peter (Rotterdam). Together, these intersecting pilot case studies will help to generate a blueprint of the correspondence networks of the foreign or stranger churches across Europe in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

During a ten week Short term Scientific Mission in the Netherlands I aim to examine a digital solution for the addition of keywords to correspondence meta-data, in relation to the Early Modern Letters Online project. Firstly I will focus on the addition of keywords from the editor’s perspective, looking at the creation of an international and practical list (or lists) of keywords. My work as a Digital Fellow for EMLO allows me to concentrate on this challenge first-hand and in addition I will collaborate with Charles van den Heuvel (of the ePistolarium project). By using a topic-modelling approach a first selection of words and one or more hierarchies of subjects could be formulated by extracting them from early modern letters and by using modern categories as well as historical classifications. Secondly, I propose to focus on the topics of letters from a scholars’ and (future) contributors’ point of view by uploading the correspondence of scholar Hadriaan Beverland (1650-1716) into EMLO. A 10 week stay in the Netherlands will allow me to complete the primary material for my mission and to work with designers of the ePistolarium project and scholars of the Huygens Institute for six weeks, using Beverland’s correspondence to experiment with keywords and the use of topic modelling to formulate practical, durable, and international lists of topics. This mission will engage with the different tasks outlined in the agenda of Workgroup 3 of this COST action chaired by Charles van den Heuvel, which is focused on Texts and Topics. By concentrating on ‘topic modelling’ (III.2) and the development of a virtual research environment (V), bringing together temporal, spatial, and topical aspects of letters in an integrated online interface, this mission aims to contribute to solving different challenges formulated by this workgroup.

In collaboration with the Oxford based EMLO (Early Modern Letters Online), the Culture of Knowledge team and WG2 leaders (especially Tanya Grey Jones and Eutu Mäkelä), experience on the following issues, challenges and problems relating to the prosopographical data will be shared and discussed: 1: A critical study of EMLO’s prosopographical data model based on my own experience on prosopographical studies. o Contribution: Compare different data models; i.e. my experiences and practices with the model and the practices of EMLO. Which elements are deemed important, necessary and indispensable? Which elements of the EMLO data model coincide with or depart from my practice? And where they depart, which model is the most advantageous – i.e., what are the (dis)advantages between the models? It will be a contribution to the important aim of laying a firm foundation of the prosopographical data model for the future work. o Outcome: A memo discussing the findings and suggesting specific changes and improvements. o Targeted WG and agenda item: Cost Working Group 2, agenda item II. 2: A test-drive of EMLO’s prosopographical web form. o Contribution: In relation to point 1, a test drive on the prosopographical web form could be performed. o Outcome: A memo discussing the test results and suggesting specific changes and improvements. o Targeted WG and agenda item: Cost Working Group 2, agenda item II/IV. 3: A critical study on mining prosopographical data. o Contribution: Firstly, share my experiences on the challenges of mining and using national encyclopedias and other biographical sources. Secondly, share my knowledge on collecting data from the Nordic region. o Outcome: A memo that 1) discuss the general challenges of mining data and 2) provides specific information on collecting prosopographical data in the Nordic region; i.e. information on archives, libraries, biographical sources, national biographical encyclopedias and databases etc. o Targeted WG and agenda item: Cost Working Group 2, agenda item III. 4: Discussing visualisations strategies on prosopographical metadata (preparation for the workshop in Milan 2016).

During my stay as a STSM grantee in Milan between 27th September and 23rd October 2015, I entered into a collaboration with designers from the DensityDesign Research Lab http://www.densitydesign.org/ at the Politecnico di Milano to explore possibilities as well as problems of visualization of J. A. Comenius’ correspondence. With their help I identified visualization tools that are easily accessible for beginner user and experimented with them. I created a list evaluating these tools from my point of view and wrote a diary/blog describing my experimenting with the data. However I soon realized that formatting of the data is the key for every even the most simple of visualization and I learned some basic formatting skills. In order to help other scholars with little experience in data formatting and visualizations, I created a video tutorial that shows some basic data formatting steps as well as geographic visualization of Comenius correspondence in visualization tool Carto DB. At the same time I was also preparing visualizations for the collective volume “Practice of Scholarly Communication: Correspondence Networks between Central and Western Europe, 1550-1700” which helped me to get access to various kind of early modern scholarly correspondence data as well as to ideas and visualization requests of scholars working with them.

The main scientific purpose of the proposed STSM is to develop an Open policy for sharing of metadata in the framework of the project. The STSM will allow research collaboration on the main legal (copyright law) issues related to the main purpose. In order to be achieved the objective shall undertake research in the following directions: - Investigation of the current copyright and other legal issues in the framework of the project; - Investigation on the current EMLO policy on metadata sharing; - Copyright issues in bulk data reuse; - Practical issues related to the sharing of metadata; types of metadata etc.; Consultations on the above issues are planned with the core team of Culture of Knowledge/EMLO and in particular Miranda Lewis (Digital Editor for Cultures of Knowledge) and Arno Bosse, Digital Project Manager. The scientific consultations/discussions are planned in both directions – 1) on practical issues related to the metadata’ sharing, Assessment of the positive/negative features of current models; 2) copyright issues/open policy development in the project. Based on the above the main points in the development of an open policy for sharing of metadata within the digital platform of the project will be outlined.

The goal of the STSM "Prosopographical Profiling of Subgroups in Correspondences" is to explore possibilities to use existing digital tools to reconstruct the diachronic development of subgroups within a large international correspondence; and to link their formation to prosopographical events. As a case study I propose to use the epistolary network of Gijsbert Cuper (1644-1716), a scholar active on many levels and connecting a wide range of scholars all over Europe. In particular, the intention is to experiment with altering the prosopographical model so as to allow for the identification of subgroups within the correspondence as a whole, reconstructing their chronological development, and linking them to prosopographical events. This would provide an accessible way for scholars in the humanities inserting data in the prosopographical model or a similar database, to analyse the internal structure of the correspondences they study, before deciding on the larger investment in expertise for a specialized network analysis. The STSM comprises a threeweek stay at Oxford to collaborate with technical experts and explore the tools available for extracting data from the prosopographical model so as to yield the required results.

Location: Mainly Oxford, and secondarily Lancaster Duration: Six weeks divided into two distinct phases. Phase 1 (three weeks): observation -Extensive study of a panel of recent works relating to geographic representation of various kinds of flows -Training in GIS - Detailed analysis of ORBIS, the program developed at Stanford University, devoted to travels in Greco-Roman Antiquity: this analysis will be especially concerned with global architecture, methodological choices, parameters, software applications and databases which lie behind the impressive interface that is available online. All my observations will be recorded and digested in a descriptive report, which will assess the main achievements and limits of the various methods in use tor represent geographic flows. Phase 2 (three weeks): conjecture and proposals -Realization of a practical plan aiming at laying the necessary foundations to realize, in future, an interactive map reflecting international mail communications between 1500 and 1800 -Sketch of a critical bibliography of the main synthetic sources at a European scale -Experimental attempts: drawings of various maps describing postal relations between London and a selection of foreign destinations on the continent, at different dates All these elements will join the final report in the form of several subsections. The two phases will be conducted maintaining a constant dialogue with other historians, geographers and IT specialists. After the mission, the whole report -- observations and proposals -- will be reduced in the form of an article. Then it could be published in a specialized review, or also be presented during a conference or a workshop on historical methods.

In the month of February I had the opportunity to contribute to working group 4 of COST Action IS1310 “Reassembling the Republic of Letters” by executing a Short Term Scientific Mission (STSM). My work consisted of digitising the titles of books containing letters as listed in the bibliographies of Estermann, Arenhold and Molhuysen. The first week of February I visited the team of Cultures of Knowledge at the University of Oxford. There I benefitted from the team’s extensive experience with the construction of Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO). The visit provided me with some fascinating insights into the problems with compiling and digitising such extensive databases. Further, I was fortunate enough to attend a talk given by Miranda Lewis about the Bodleian Library’s card catalogue, which was especially interesting given my work with the Molhuysen Apparatus, which is a similar - though less extensive - card catalogue. 

In the week I spent in Oxford I, much to my surprise, managed to complete entering the data from Estermann. I collected a total of 569 titles in no more than 13 hours total: That means that I needed approximately a minute and twenty seconds to enter one title, which is far less than the initial estimate of three minutes. This was at least partially due to the fact that I quickly noticed that almost all these titles were easily findable in the online catalogue of the Herzog August Bibliothek. The remaining few could be found in WorldCat. This meant that I did not have to search several databases, which, I suspect, saved me quite a bit of time. I would like to point out that someone doing this type of work should not underestimate how tiring this work is. To avoid getting headaches and neck pain I made sure to work in smaller blocks: I worked 4,5 hours max before taking a long break. 

Upon returning to the Netherlands I began working on Arenhold. Unfortunately I found myself delayed due to illness, but in all this part of my STSM proceeded at an acceptable pace. I entered a total of 855 titles in 43 hours, which means I needed roughly 3 minutes per title. This is clearly much slower than Estermann, which can in part be explained by my illness, but is - in my opinion - mostly due to the way the books are listed in Arenhold: Whereas Estermann gives simply the title, Arenhold tells us things like “There exist two letters in the second edition…” and depending on which part of the work one is working with, this information is given in different languages. 

Finally, I spent two half-days in the Leiden University Library to work on Molhuysen. Molhuysen turns out to be a much more valuable source than I initially expected. My expectation was that many of the works would prove difficult to find due to the minimal amount of information that Molhuysen gives about them and those that could be found would probably also be listed in either Estermann or Arenhold. This turned out not to be the case. I entered a total of 495 titles into the Zotero database. Although there may be some duplicates, I have avoided this as much as possible. The task took me 7,5 hours, which means one title cost me approximately one minute to enter. 

I made an effort to save all the URL’s of the digital versions listed in Worldcat. I hoped that this would make Emma Mojet’s work a little easier. From this I gleaned that quite a lot of these works are indeed digitally available — and I have to admit I found this surprising. Mostly, however, I was excited by this discovery. I could not help but feel excited about the opportunities afforded by widely available material like this! This sense of excitement was also clearly present in everyone I have come across in this project; Dirk, Miranda, Arno, Howard and that made this project extra special. For that, I am grateful. 

To sum up: In a total of some 8 full working days I managed to create a database with approximately 1900 titles. The task was quite tedious and spreading the work was necessary, but ultimately the project was very rewarding. I am excited to see what the end result will be and will certainly be paying close attention to efforts to make the Republic of Letters available in the digital age.

Combined with the URL to a Scan of the Work

Two weeks ago I was fortunate enough to visit Cultures of Knowledge and EMLO on a Short Term Scientific Mission (STSM). The STSM was for Working Group 4 of COST Action IS1310 “Reassembling the Republic of Letters.” More specifically, my task in this mission was to compile a database of early modern epistolaries combined with the URL to a scan of the work. This scan should then preferably be machine readable (OCR’d), but it was interesting to see how many scans were available and of which titles. Important in finding these scans was to certify that they were publically accessible. Scans which were only available after registering or signing-up via an institution, were avoided. I did this so that any link in the database can be accessed at any time or place. Furthermore, I made sure to keep track of where I was finding the scans. This statistic is of explicit interest to the Cultures of Knowledge group, since it gives insight into what works are available where.

I worked with the database which had been compiled by Lara Berger, my STSM colleague who visited Oxford in February. She had entered all epistolaries recorded by Arenhold, Estermann and Molhuysen in our shared Zotero folder. My work consisted of searching for these titles and finding openly accessible scans to attach to the data which had been entered by Lara. To do this, I started by plugging the title into Google. Usually this would give a couple of hits or a direction in which I needed to search further. Because I used Google a lot, many of the hits came from GoogleBooks. Google has digitalised many works over the years and has compiled scans from different archives and universities and made these accessible. Furthermore, most of the scans on GoogleBooks are machine readable, which makes GoogleBooks a very valuable source for research with early modern letters. After searching through Google, I always checked Internet Archive and Europeana, which often linked to the German digital libraries or the French national library. I did this so as to find as many scans as possible, hence ensuring the best possible scans. At times I would find .txt, .xml or .pdf files which I also attached to the database. Having completed the titles from Arenhold, my statistics are as follows:

Here I have highlighted in yellow my top five sources for the scans. Of the 816 entries from Arenhold, I was unable to find 94, 11.5%. This is an extremely good statistic and I am very happy with this percentage. I had not expected to be able to find this many early modern works online, publicly accessible. It shows that projects such as this and Cultures of Knowledge are really worthwhile attempts to collect and connect all this data. Furthermore, the fact that I have 1.5 as many URLs as entries from Arenhold (1225 scans with 816 entries) means that the material is available in various places and formats, probably also with varying quality. I find this surprising but especially very promising for further research!

My week at Cultures of Knowledge was instructive and inspiring: I really enjoyed the talks which we had concerning my findings and progress, and I learnt a lot from them. In addition to working in the middle of the Cultures of Knowledge group, I was able to attend a workshop organised by EMLO on correcting the dates of letters in the database. This Correct-a-date-athon (not a dating workshop) was not only interesting, but it was also a lot of fun. During the week, I met many interesting people and had some great conversations. I am really thankful for the warm welcome and friendly environment which I met while working at Cultures of Knowledge and my stay has been very enjoyable. I would especially like to thank Miranda and Arno for this. It has been a great introduction to the University of Oxford, to Cultures of Knowledge, and to EMLO, and I really hope to be back.

Note: As of 1 April, the Zotero database EROL counts 1874 titles. Of these, 1666 are linked to online editions in the open domain. References: S,H, Arenhold, Conspectus Bibliothecae Universalis Historico-Literario-Criticae Epistolarum: Typis Expressarum Et M[anu]S[crip]tarum, Illustrium Omnis Aevi Et Eruditissimorum Auctorum, Hanover 1746; M. Estermann Verzeichnis der gedruckten Briefe deutscher Autoren des 17. Jahrhunderts. Tl. 1: Drucke zwischen 1600 und 1750, 4 vols, Wiesbaden, 1992-1993; P.C. Molhuysen, Lijst van geëxcerpeerde boeken voor hs. Ltk. 1643 (apparaat Molhuysen) Leiden University, shelfmark DOUSA 80 1604.

The purpose of the scientific mission was to gather experience how to deal with prosopographical information conveyed by letters in a digital environment. I therefore visited two institutions hosting highly diverse and very information rich prosopographical resources: The Digital Humanities Workgroup at the Berlin-Brandenburg-Academy of Science ( “Telota”) and the DH Lab at the Department for Digital Humanities at King's College London (“DHLab”). Telota has built an extensive cross domain infrastructure for prosopographical data, the "Personendatenrepositorium" (http://pdr.bbaw.de/). John Bradley has contributed to the Prosopography of Byzantine Empire (pbe.kcl.ac.uk), the Prosopography of the Byzantine world (http://blog.pbw.cch.kcl.ac.uk/), the Prosopography of Anglo Saxon England (http://pase.ac.uk/index.html), and the People of Medieval Scotland database (http://www.poms.ac.uk/), and DHLab is currently working on the Digitisation of the Prosopography of the Roman Republic. 

As a result of these travels we agreed on further collaboration in form of a workshop with invited specialists in the field to be held in 2017, February 20/21 in Vienna.

Last month I had the good fortune to attend a week-long Design Sprint which was organized as part of the COST Action Reassembling the Republic of Letters Working Group 3 programme and held at the HuygensING in The Hague. A Design Sprint brings together a pre-selected group of specialists — in this case IT developers, project managers, scholars, and editors — and enables them to work on a single test-case in a series of intensive back-on-back sessions. The objective of a Sprint is to compress into a limited number of days what might otherwise take months of interrupted discussion, experimentation, and development, and at the end of the set period a prototype is unveiled to serve either as a starting point or as a proof of concept. 

This Design Sprint focussed on one of the core considerations of Working Group 3, namely the subjects discussed in early modern correspondence and their standardization, capture, and representation in a digital catalogue. One working week was set aside for nine individuals to grapple with the following tasks: to understand and articulate the problems and pitfalls encountered by scholars as they work to define the subjects and keywords under discussion in early modern correspondence; to establish what, in an ideal scenario, might meet the demands of this research as scholars work in a digital environment; to impose a structured format on hitherto unstructured data; to discuss and assess potential solutions; and to identify and work on a prototype that could be developed to demonstrate ‘proof of concept’. All this in five days — no mean task. 

I was particularly interested to participate in my capacity as Digital Editor of Early Modern Letters Online [EMLO]. In EMLO’s current data model it is possible to capture both keywords and subject headings for individual letters, but it is not possible for scholars to reference and draw automatically on an established taxonomy, nor at present is it a simple matter to ensure standardization of keywords across multiple correspondence catalogues. When EMLO was in development, few scholarly contributors were volunteering to record in the union catalogue the topics discussed in the correspondences under their investigation. Such work can take a disproportionate amount of time, something contributors to EMLO have in fearfully short supply. Many contributors, who were offering for publication calendars collated in the course of research carried out at earlier stages of their careers, were not in a position to return to supplement their metadata with this information. Thus, in EMLO’s early years, basic fields for subject words and keywords were included in the data model, but it was not thought necessary at that stage to develop a structured and referenced system. More recently, however, a number of contributing scholars have expressed interest in assigning both broader subject and more specific keywords to their corpora of letters. Although at EMLO we have investigated the potential use of a number of different ontologies, we have found neither one that fulfils the often quite different needs of these scholars, nor a means of allowing the flexibility that each individual scholar requires. EMLO receives contributions from large numbers of scholars and projects working on a range of correspondences from different centuries in a variety of languages, and the topics found within these correspondences are diverse. 

The five days of the Sprint at HuygensING were divided clearly into separate sessions by the indefatigable and clear-headed Sprint coordinator, IT project manager Astrid Kulsom. With admirable skill and aptitude, she guided the assembled group through the initial stage of identifying and ‘unpacking’ the problem, which came in the form of the subject of doctoral student Karen Hollewand’s subject of research —Dutch scholar Hadriaan Beverland (1650–1716). 

Beverland proved an inspired — and entertaining — case study. Banished from the United Provinces in 1679 for reasons you may guess when you read the second half of this sentence, he was obsessed with exploring in his written work and correspondence (in alphabetical order, rather than priority of subject) scholarship, scripture, sex, and sin. Best known from his somewhat louche depiction in a portrait attributed to Ary de Vois and now in the Rijksmuseum (I can’t resist mentioning it is worth seeking out Beverland as he leans back in his chair, pipe in hand, with a scantily clad woman, usually described as a prostitute, at his side), Beverland gave us all the double entrendres we could have asked for, as well as proof that there are certain topics only a human eye is able to tag: Venus; or sin; or voluptas. We found in Beveland problems that arise from the use of different languages, the ‘you say prodraga, and I say gout; he says kramp and she says gicht’ issues. Using a small selection of his letters, we were able to discuss how ideally scholars need access to multiple ontologies (for example, the Library of Congress classifications, or Iconclass, or InPhO, etc.) as well as to early modern classification lists; how they need access to a range of dictionaries (Oxford English Dictionary, Lewis and Short, Duden, Larousse, etc.). We determined quickly that established ontologies were not detailed enough for our needs, that scholars would have to be provided with a structured method of adding their own terms, sometimes terms very specific to the correspondence upon which they worked and sometimes terms shared across other early modern correspondences. We recognised that scholars would need the ability to add annotations to certain keywords to explain their usage, their meaning(s), and the editorial decisions behind the word’s selection so that other scholars could see at a glance whether a particular ‘user-added keyword’ was the one they needed to select (rather than creating a duplicate or variant). And we agreed that to make these ‘user-added’ keywords meaningful and to connect them usefully to larger schemas, they should be linked to terms (and thus, by extension, to branches) that exist in established ontologies. Following demonstrations from Walter Ravenek (IT Developer of the Circulation of Knowledge project’s ePistolarium database) and Charles van den Heuvel (Professor of Digital Method in Historical Disciplines) and with significant input from Ludovica Marinucci (Università di Cagliari, currently on an internship at the HuygensING during which she is working on the use of keywords for mapping between the letters and texts of Christiaan Huygens), we considered the potential for extracting automatically generated keywords, subsequently gathered under topic headings, from digitized text and then discussed how this would have to be combined with oversight from scholars who would need to be able to link back to the original digital transcription. 

We spent a day pondering these problems, brainstorming, and compiling a wish-list. Day Two was a devoted to sketching ideas and coming to terms (no pun intended!) with what might be possible. ‘Decision day’ was midweek: what would be possible within the constraints of the Sprint. And it was at this point that IT Developer René van der Ark withdrew to his workstation to focus on the prototype. His work moved centre stage on Day Four as the prototype was run back and forth through various iterations as suggestions were sought and updates delivered, authority files downloaded and incorporated, and what was not deemed possible or practical to include was channelled into a ‘roadmap’ for future consideration. And then came the ‘Day of the Proof of 3 Concept’ on which the prototype was unveiled to members of HugyensING staff in a team presentation. 

What I took away with me from this Sprint was the conviction that structuring of topic metadata is something that would be extremely useful in EMLO and, if possible, should be implemented in the next round of development. Whenever subjects and keywords are collated for an early modern correspondence, these should be standardised and linked across the union catalogue to those recorded in other correspondences. ‘User-added’ keywords have to be linked to established ontologies and attached to the relevant branches from where, at a higher level, subject terms may be extracted and stored. Keywords, and the schemas into which they feed, could be visualised both over multiple correspondences and chronologically, but only if scholars use the agreed set of authority files. This could be extremely exciting and revealing work and I headed home to Oxford dreaming of visualizations of trees of knowledge with letters and keywords hanging off as virtual leaves. It was an exceptionally productive week and I am now an enthusiastic advocate of the Design Sprint format for concentrated collaborative work. One challenge remains, however: to ensure that all that was learned and demonstrated in The Hague can be picked up and carried forward to fruition.

During my STSM I participated in the design sprint “Keywords and Text” organized by the Huygens ING in the Hague, 11-16 April 2016. Following previous design sprints organized by the WG 6 to make an user interface that facilitates the mapping from unstructured to structured data, IT specialists of the Huygens ING and of the (W)EMLO project developed here – in collaboration with historians of the Dutch Republic of Letters and other members of the Action´s WG3 specializing in topic-modelling – new methods of keywords indexing, suitable for early modern learned correspondence to be published online. Moreover, my agenda was to prepare the WG3-session for the Warsaw conference which will concentrate on new research questions regarding the Republic of Letters and early modern scholarly communication from the perspective of technological issues. All further outcomes arising from my mission will be advised to the STSM coordinator.

During my mission in Portugal I will prepare a census of early modern scholarly correspondences held in Portuguese Archives and Libraries. I would like to offer an online guide for researchers interested in stuyding Iberian worlds of learning as well as the interactions of these worlds with the intellectual, religious, diplomatic and mercantile dimensions of early modern communities of knowledge. I will focus on a series of correspondences related with the letters exchanged by one of the most notorious Iberian letter writers of the seventeenth century, Vicente Nogueira (1586-1654). This case study is part of a broader project on the Iberian dimensions of the early modern Republic of Letters and it is related with the writing of my book on Scholarship and the Making of Politics in Early Modern Empires: The Iberian Routes of the Republic of Letters. Ultimately, my mission will help me prepare the digital edition of Nogueira’s letters including his many correspondences beyond Portugal.

Italians wrote more letters than any other early modern group: against a backdrop of merchant letters from the 13th and 14th centuries and letters exchanged between humanists and literary figures in in the 15th, collections of printed vernacular letters poured from Venetian presses in the 16th.  A vast quantity of letters was exchanged between doctors, astronomers, physicists, literary figures and musicians in 16th-century Italy, and intersecting with this outflow were courtly, facetious, and scientific letters from academicians; circulars describing natural and ethnographic phenomena written by Jesuits; advisory letters written by traveling diplomats, and spiritual letters written by religious figures. Many of these letters were widely copied, circulated, published and republished. Yet records of early modern Italian correspondence and the letters themselves, however, can be difficult to locate, in part because the letters are dispersed across so many different repositories and in part because of the wide diversity of types of finding aids and inventories (e.g., .pdf, handwritten, typewritten, and online inventories and data sources).

An Early Modern Italian Letters Census

This short-term scientific mission (STSM) consisted of canvassing early modern Italian letters sources with an eye to the requirements of a more comprehensive census. The project consisted of forays into Italian archives and a residence in Oxford so as to understand EMLO data requirements. The project confronted challenges both technological and prosopographic. On the technical side, there were issues of undigitized catalogues and integrating diverse data sources and bibliographic formats. On the prosopographic, basic biographical metadata was collected for several hundred letter-writers to ascertain whether they fell within EMLO’s temporal remit. Other challenges included the problem of duplicate records, database organization, and questions of translation.

Outcomes

The STSM resulted in two projects: 1) a report to help future researchers find early modern Italian letters and 2) a database of Early Modern Italian Letters, or EMIL, which contains information on 128 letters repositories, metadata on 4,700 early modern Italian letters sources, and metadata on 2,700 individual letters. Database categories consist of the name of the letter-writer, their biographical metadata and profession, the name of the archive and shelfmark and a link to the source where possible, whether the source is in manuscript or print format, whether it is early modern or modern, whether it is in catalogue or item format, and where applicable, notes on the size of the letters collection or other factors.

During my STSM in Oxford in March/April 2016 I engaged in the development of a data model for representing biographical information for prosopographical research. The resulting Biographical Conceptual Reference Model (Bio CRM) is a general, event-based and role-centric schema, which can be applied to different prosopographical databases, by extending it with particular event and role classification schemes. The design of the data model is based on the anticipated use cases for prosopographical research, in the sense that the data model should support the principal tasks relevant for the researchers in this area. The work started with analyzing the current data model of the Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) database managed in Oxford. The EMLO data model is an event--based, person-- and role--centric model for representing the activities a person has participated in during his life, essentially forming his biography. A such activity involves one or more participants, acting in specific roles, place(s), and a time expression. The EMLO data model is based on PROV for representing the activities and the participant roles. Further, related data models for representing (biographical) events were inspected and compared, including: CIDOC CRM, BIO, Relationship, BIBO, ORG, Event Ontology, LODE, VIVO, Simple Event Model (SEM), ULAN, and PROSO. The outcome of the work is a data model with the following features: -- Act as an extension of CIDOC CRM for compatibility with other cultural heritage datasets. -- Separation of the general biographical data model from the EMLO--specific event types and participant roles, to support also other kinds of prosopographical datasets, concerning different cultures and time periods. - Support for principal query types for prosopographical research: finding a set of people who share selected characteristics, and extracting networks of people based on some criterion for further analysis, e.g., with external visualization toolkits. -- Distinguish between unary roles (e.g., professions), binary relationships (e.g., family relations), and events (e.g., baptism) of person’s biography for intuitive information representation and query writing, with a shared role--centric modeling approach. -- Represent the roles of participants of events as instances of OWL classes, enabling reasoning and validation of the integrity of prosopographical data created based on the model, ensuring the quality of the data (e.g., a baptism may involve only participants in the roles of baptismal candidate, officiant, etc.). Bio CRM facilitates the integration of different prosopographical datasets represented with their own classification schemes for events, actors, roles, etc., in the spirit of CIDOC CRM, which aims to harmonize datasets on the field of cultural heritage.

Background: The impetus for this project grew out of a presentation I gave at a meeting of Working Group 4: Documents and Collections in The Hague in 2016. The paper discussed various approaches to defining letter genres in different European languages, described examples of selected early modern letter genres, and thematised the challenges of relating historical letter classes to contemporary concepts of letter genres. Discussion of my paper in The Hague revealed the need for further research into this subject and in particular for focused reflection on how to integrate information on letter genres into the data sets of digital humanities projects (e.g. digital editions or catalogues of correspondence). Aims The planned STSM directly addresses one of the principle tasks outlined in the agenda of Working Group 4 which is ‘to contribute to the refinement of a shared data model which includes common definitions of the physical features of the letter, its basic genres, and its modes of dissemination and preservation’ (http://www.republicofletters.net/index.php/working-groups/documents-and…). 

The main aims of the STSM are: 

1. to deliver a consolidated account of the current state of international research on letter genres across a range of disciplines;
2. to highlight particular challenges with which conceptualizations of letter genres are confronted; and
3. to develop suggestions on how to overcome these challenges with the immediate aim of enabling the appropriate and helpful integration of information on letter genres into current and future sets of descriptive metadata. 

Work planned: In realizing this project, I will draw both on my personal research into early modern letter writing cultures and letter genres (cf. my monograph Abschiedsbriefe in Literatur und Kultur des 18. Jahrhunderts, Berlin/Boston 2012) and my work as a member of the interdisciplinary publishing project Handbuch Brief (Letters – A Handbook; 2014–2019). I will also conduct additional research into recent discussions of letter theory and genre theory. The STSM will last 17 days and take place from 29 November 2017 to 15 December 2017. Research and writing will take place in parallel and follow the outline below: I. Definitions II. Historical letter classes III. Modern concepts IV. Letter genres in metadata Host institution My main reason for choosing Aarhus University as host institution for this STSM is the opportunity to work with Prof. Eve-Marie Becker in the School of Culture and Society, Faculty of Arts. Prof. Becker is an expert in early Christian letter writing cultures and has published widely on the subject. The interdisciplinary dialogue with her will be valuable for my research and also beneficial for her work. As one of the leading research institutions in Denmark, Aarhus University is a very suitable setting for my STSM. 

Results and benefits to COST Action IS1310: The STSM will result in a paper of min. 4,000 words in length. The text will be published as part of a larger chapter written collectively by members of Working Group 4, including group leader Elizabethanne Boran. The chapter will be published in the collection Reassembling the Republic of Letters: Systems, Standards, Scholarship with Göttingen Press; this book will constitute one of the principal outputs of the COST Action. Benefits to the applicant A clearer sense of how letter genres should be conceptualized and how information on such genres could be usefully included in sets of descriptive metadata will also benefit the larger – and potentially collaborative and international – interdisciplinary research project I am currently developing. The project focuses on European children’s creative output and its cultural contexts from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Alongside drawings, diaries, and other child-made artefacts, children’s correspondence will form a core source material for this project. In the longer run, I would also like to develop a database that records information on archival (and other types of) holdings of child-made sources

1. Aim & Motivation: All letter records require the accurate identification of people, places, and dates. For places, this requires capturing data describing changes in the manner in which places are both named and nested within larger geographical, administrative, and ecclesiastical entities. But most modern gazetteers (e.g. GeoNames) capture very little of this historical complexity. They typically lack both historical usage and a chronology of the contexts which a given place has occupied throughout its history. The main goals of the STSM will be to prepare (1) a draft data model capable of capturing multiple dimensions of geospatial change over time, and (2) a draft userinterface and set of workflows for an implementation of the data model as a standaline resource (EM Places). If time permits, as a secondary goal, some initial preparatory work will be done on a set of draft workflows and user-interfaces for an associated resource for converting between early modern calendars and dates (EM Dates).
2. Contribution to the Scientific Objectives of the Action: The STSM directly addresses point II.3 in the goals for Working Group 1 ‘Space and Time’, namely: “Develop means of creating new subgazetteers for extending, enhancing, and correcting existing gazetteers.”
3. Techniques and Planning: Starting out from a review of the current research literature on enriched gazetteers (e.g. ‘Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers’, ed. Mostern et al, 2016), evaluate the data models and editorial policies employed by relevant historical geo-gazetteers such as GeoNames, GettyTGN, Pleiades, and GOV. This stage of the planning has been underway at Oxford for several weeks and is now largely complete. Next, at the Huygens during my STSM, prepare a draft data model which can accomodate the requirements of the Action’s community and which adheres to current technical best practices. This work will be undertaken in close collaboration with Dr. Marnix van Berchum and colleagues at the Huygens. Finally, also at the Huygens, prepare the suggested workflows and draft user-interfaces (mock-ups) for an implementation of this data model as a standaline geo-gazetteer, based on the Huygens’ Timbuctoo infrastructure. This work will be undertaken in close collaboration with Dr. Glauco Mantegari, a UI/UX designer who will be visiting the Huygens during the time of my STSM. A report describing the above work will be shared inside the Action and with other relevant communities (Pelagios Commons) for feedback and comment. Following this, the report will form the basis for ‘EM Places’, a standalone, Linked Open Data geogazetteer, created jointly by the Huygens Institute and the Cultures of Knowledge project at the University of Oxford.