CKCC Geleerdenbrieven

How did knowledge circulate in the 17th-century Dutch Republic? A team of historians, literature researchers, linguists and computer scientists has started to answer this question in the project Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-century Dutch Republic. A Web-based Humanities’ Collaboratory on Correspondences. This project, called CKCC Geleerdenbrieven (i.e., scholarly letters) for short, is carried out thanks to a NWO Medium investment subsidy.

The scientific revolution of the 17th century was driven by countless discoveries in the observatory, at sea, in the library, in the workshop and in society at large. The Netherlands, in those days an assembly of European thinkers and intellectuals, were also a hub of ideas and scientific transfer. But how were new elements of knowledge picked up, processed, disseminated and – ultimately – accepted in broad circles of the educated community?

To meet this research question researchers are building a multidisciplinary collaboratory to analyze a machine-readable and growing corpus of letters of scholars who lived in the 17th-century Dutch Republic. 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. For a start, the corpus contains twenty thousand letters. The project will develop web-based tools, for instance for text mining (“search all letters for …”) and visualisation (“display who corresponded with whom between 1670-1675”). DANS is responsible for archiving and providing sustained access to resource material and results of the text analyses.

Partners:
• Descartes Centre of Utrecht University;
• Huygens ING;
• National Library of the Netherlands;
• Historical literature studies of the University of Amsterdam.

Contact person DANS:
Dr Marjan Grootveld
T 06 1210 1514 E marjan.grootveld at dans.knaw.nl