Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the Digital Age, or: Networking to the Fourth Power

Howard Hotson (University of Oxford) und Thomas Wallnig (Universität Wien)

(Vortrag in englischer Sprache)

Between 2014 and 2019, a community of over 200 academics from more than 30 countries joined a European research network called Reassembling the Republic of Letters. The purpose of the exercise was to assemble an interdisciplinary network to design a networking platform to support a scholarly network studying past intellectual networks. With this purpose in mind, scholars, librarians and developers worked together towards a pair of complementary goals. One goal was technical: to negotiate the basis for a distributed digital infrastructure for studying early modern intellectual correspondence. The other goal was scholarly: to experiment with the new forms of collaborative scholarship which could emerge on such infrastructure to generate a polyphonic, transnational intellectual history of the early modern world. Both aspects are documented in a collaboratively written volume, published in 2019, which also relates individual historical case studies to a wide range of traditional methodological frameworks, from social history to the history of ideas. The paper will introduce the audience to the details of the book and the project underlying it, and discuss recent developments both in the field of infrastructure and in that of scholarly methodology.

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