EARLY MODERN
HISTORY
Distant Reading: the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and Cultures of Knowledge
As a digital fellow at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Study, and under the auspices of a grant from the Yale Digital Humanities Lab, I worked to restructure and 'clean' data contained in early modern manuscript catalogues so that it would be digitally accessible. The goal was to better understand what early modern Florentines copied and read. Applying the technique of 'Distant Reading' to early. twentieth-century manuscript catalogues, I analyzed how early modern Florentines received and understood information about nonChristian 'others', namely, Jews and Ottomans.
For Cultures of Knowledge at Oxford University, I developed a database of over 4,800 early modern Italian letter collections and individual letters so that these would be better represented in this larger project devoted to early modern letters. Again, the goal was access.
Both these projects involved experiments with data scraping and crosswalking, developing data ontologies, metadata, negotiating copyright, and collaborating with multiple stakeholders.
The SDBM continuously aggregates and updates observations of pre-modern manuscripts drawn from over 13,000 auction and sales catalogs, inventories, catalogs from institutional and private collections, and other sources that document the sales and locations of these books from around the world.
The Digital Humanities Laboratory (DHLab), a unit of Yale University Library, offers space, community, and resources for Yale scholars who are using computational methods to pursue research questions in the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences.
Established in 2009, Cultures of Knowledge and Early Modern Letters Online is a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project based at the University of Oxford with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. They use digital methods to reassemble and interpret the correspondence networks of the early modern period.
The Mazzatinti catalogue is the only description of the manuscripts copied between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries that are housed at Florence's main library, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale.
This paper uses the technique of 'Distant Reading' on Florentine manuscript catalogues to understand how and from whom Florentines learned about Ottomans and Jews.
A database of early modern letters, ItaLet contains descriptions and links to over 4,500 early modern letters collections and individual letters.